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STEM Faculty

Explore study opportunities from STEM Faculty.

The OpenEngineering Laboratory

The OpenEngineering Laboratory (OEL) offers practical laboratory-based teaching at a distance covering, electronics, signal-processing, control, materials and mechanical engineering. The OEL allows our engineering students to remotely connect to instrumentation, data, and equipment to undertake experiments and investigations. There are more than 30 activities serving over 6,000 students per year. Students can access the OEL from wherever they have an internet connection and at a time of their choosing.

Key features include:

  • Equipment accessed in real-time
  • Ultra-low latency connection for instantaneous experience
  • Video, sound and data streaming from test-grade engineering rigs
  • Capacity for over 300 experiment kits available simultaneously
  • Available to students 22 hours per day

Example activities:

A red vertical shaft, a pendulum, is connected to a motor via a vertical shaft which can be moved back and forth in clockwise and anticlockwise directions. The pendulum is attached to this shaft by a horizontal pin, allowing it to rotate freely in a vertical plane. The motor is mounted on top of a black block that is standing on the flat electronic control board that allows remote operation of the motor. The control board also has a sensor which can read the angular displacement of the pendulum through time.

Pendulum

Investigate the dynamic behaviour of a driven pendulum to observe the relationship between its frequency, amplitude and phase.

A photo of 61 metres of a red very thin copper wire with a diameter of 140 microns that is randomly tucked inside a conical glass flask to ensure that it is uniformly heated.

Resistivity

Monitor the electrical resistance of a copper wire through heating and cooling cycles to investigate the effect of joule heating on the efficiency of power transmission.

A picture of the transparent section of a wind tunnel that contains two toy cars, one green and one red. The transparent section has a round hatch that can be opened to insert and remove items from the wind tunnel.

Wind tunnels

Students explore aspects of fluid flow by remotely operating a wind tunnel.

For more details about Open University courses in Engineering see here.