N I Skills Competition 2009
Engineers of the future show their skills
Maintenance engineering apprentices, from major companies across Northern Ireland, today showcased their expertise in the first Northern Ireland Mechatronics skills competition.
Mechatronics is the combination of mechanical and electronic engineering to create useful products. It represents an industry-wide effort to improve the design process by integrating the best available development practices and technologies to streamline design, prototyping and deployment. For those designing industrial machinery, equipment, vehicles or other devices with moving parts and electronically controlled actuators, Mechatronics technology can help lower development costs, reduce risk, and produce higher-quality products.
The event, funded by the Department for Employment and Learning and hosted by the Northern Regional College, Ballymena, is intended to become an annual event in the Northern Ireland skills calendar. In this year’s competition, five teams of two competitors undertook several complex Mechatronics engineering tests aiming towards the seamless integration of mechanical, electronic and software engineering.
The Mechatronics test pieces are designed to challenge the ability of apprentices to follow detailed instructions, produce accurate and neat work outputs, be economical with materials, all while working to strict timescales - essential requirements for today’s engineering manufacturing industry. The competition not only encourages apprentices to demonstrate and improve their own skills, but provides an example of the high quality work being produced in training