Group of three females and one male in front of large screen

Gamification, Xboxes, and ex-prisoners: Brighton hosts 21st European Conference on e-Learning

The University of Brighton was proud to host the 21st European Conference on e-Learning (ECEL 2022), which took place on 27-28 October 2022. 

Supported by the School of Architecture, Technology and Engineering, the conference was chaired by Brighton Principal Lecturers Dr Panagiotis Fotaris and Dr Andrew Blake. More than a hundred delegates from 33 countries attended in person and online, to hear about cutting-edge research in the field of technology-enhanced learning.

Continue reading “Gamification, Xboxes, and ex-prisoners: Brighton hosts 21st European Conference on e-Learning”

uncan-Baker Brown inside the Brighton Waste House

University of Brighton helps to shape city’s vision of the future

Brighton & Hove Council have published a Route Map outlining a Circular Economy strategy to 2035 – drawing on key input from the University of Brighton.

Brighton architecture lecturer Duncan Baker-Brown has been a global pioneer in innovative ways to cut the huge amount of waste and carbon emissions that afflict current building construction. At present, this contributes a massive 40% of overall global CO2 emissions and at least a third of the world’s waste.

Continue reading “University of Brighton helps to shape city’s vision of the future”
Catapult connected places logo

Brighton chosen as site for new testbed to improve ageing healthcare 

University of Brighton will play a key role in developing improved home-based care for the growing number of older people in the city and beyond.

The university will build on its long-term innovation partnership with Brighton and Hove City Council as part of the national Homes for Healthy Ageing Testbed project, overseen by the Connected Places Catapult (CDP)the UK government’s innovation agency for cities, transport and place leadership.

Continue reading “Brighton chosen as site for new testbed to improve ageing healthcare “

Chris Stafford at the STEM poster exhibition

Brighton researcher puts Britain’s science future on parliamentary display

University early career researcher Chris Stafford has showcased his work to UK parliamentarians in the STEM For Britain annual poster exhibition.

Dr Stafford is a Research Fellow in the University of Brighton’s world-renowned Advanced Engineering Centre, and was among a group of rising young scientists chosen as finalists in the STEM For Britain competition. This asks entrants to create a poster highlighting and explaining a current project, collecting flagship UK research to be presented to MPs, Peers and members of the influential Parliamentary & Scientific Committee.

Continue reading “Brighton researcher puts Britain’s science future on parliamentary display”

Brighton researcher floating in zero gravity

Brighton research team go weightless in latest space research project

A University of Brighton team has carried out a set of experiments flying over France on parabolic flights that create weightless conditions similar to space.

The weightless effect is achieved flying a series of steep upward and downward manoeuvres which can be compared to riding a rollercoaster with a total drop of 3km (10,000 feet)! The flights from Bordeaux’s Novespace centre are carried out by a specially adapted Airbus A310 plane that climbs then plummets in a way which balances gravitational forces to provide a sequence of short periods of weightlessness lasting around 22 seconds – but experienced 31 times each flight.

Working in collaboration with researchers from the University of Liverpool, the team from University of Brighton’s world-renowned Advanced Engineering Centre saw Professor Marco Marengo – a veteran of nearly 20 ‘weightlessness flights’ – working alongside Dr Nicolas Miché (project lead) and PhD student Francois Clemens to test pulsating heat pipes under microgravity conditions, looking at shape changes and capillary action in different arrangements of bent tubes.

Pulsating heat pipes are used to move heat from one place to another without fans or pumps, and can be used to help satellites and space probes stay at the correct temperature in the challenging conditions of space. The new system being tested by the Brighton team involved an innovative flexible form of heat pipe designed to be a forerunner of future flexible electronics, deployable radiators and booms in space operations.

Past experiments carried out by the Brighton team floating above France have looked at how heat pipes of different configurations and materials react and operate in different gravities, with implications both for safety in space as well as the effective conduct of experiments on orbital vehicles such as the International Space Station (ISS).

University of Brighton postgraduates also won the European Space Agency’s student project competition Fly Your Thesis in 2018 – after being the first UK team selected to take part in the long-running programme for 14 years.

Professor Marengo said: “What is important in this kind of flights is doing experiments directly on  set-ups under weightless conditions, which makes this program different to all the other tools for microgravity experiments, such as sounding rockets, drop towers and the ISS.

I have experienced more than 300 parabolas – over 100 minutes with absence of weight. The first time is a surprise, since you have really the impression to fly, to float in the air. It is difficult to get used to this feeling because it lasts only 22 seconds, preceded and followed by a period in hyper gravity, which can be rather heavy to cope with. In the transition between microgravity and hyper gravity, you can also feel dizzy even as frequent 0g flier.”

Novespace is part of the French Space Agency (CNES), and its Airbus A310 ZERO-G is one of the world’s largest parabolic flight aircraft. UK involvement in space has surged in recent years, with rocket bases planned for Scotland and Cornwall, and nearly 45.000 people now employed in the industry.  The UK’s latest National Space Strategy plans to invest more than £6 billion over the next 10 years to strengthen the UK as a world class space nation.  The UK Space Agency provides active support to student and research team access to microgravity platforms such as parabolic flights.