Imperial College London

Students usually work in groups of four throughout the year on a major design, make, and test activity. This is based on a project brief approved by the department, or is an agreed subtask of a wider research team. The group is required to develop the brief as a product specification, in collaboration with the supervisor acting as client. The group must also keep full records of the subsequent design, manufacture and test activities in compliance with industrial standards, including the use of logbooks, design review, formal reports, and  both poster and oral presentations. The project culminates in the high profile DMT Exhibition. Throughout the project, each student is required to work to processes detailed in a Quality Plan that their group must write and maintain.

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of continuum mechanics that underpin the theoretical understanding of many engineering disciplines and to demonstrate how problems in continuum mechanics can be solved using numerical techniques. Particular attention is paid to the theory and implementation of the finite element method. The course provides the theoretical basis for higher level courses on applications of finite element methods and finite volume methods and is a companion module to Fluid Mechanics and Stress Analysis. 

This course provides students with a fundamental understanding of the chemistry and materials science principles related to Bioengineering. It covers the main functional groups in organic molecules, their roles in building more complex structures and functionalizing surfaces; the main techniques for identifying and characterizing engineered molecules; the foundations of classical thermodynamics and applications in biomedical engineering and molecular sciences; chemical kinetics, Fick's laws and steady state diffusion; and the wet lab skills of students, including preparing a range of biomaterials and practice with the main techniques used for classifying such materials.

This course instils the principles of digital logic design and computer fundamentals. It provides a basis for students to understand what happens inside digital computers and how they communicate with the real world. It illustrates how both digital computers and complex medical instrumentation are built up from simple logic circuit elements. It relates logic and digital systems to the fundamentals of computer programming. Lastly, it provides the basic skills of programming in the ANSI C language and Matlab to convey a sense of the professionalism required of programmers in order to write reliable C code for safety-critical applications, such as medicine.

In this course, students develop their understanding of electronics components and systems architecture and how these are used in different types of biomedical instrumentation. Students then use this knowledge during a practical task to develop an instrument prototype following a set of bioengineering/biomedical specifications.

This course develops the understanding, securely based on materials science, of various common failure modes, the reasons for their occurrence and how we seek to avoid failure by design. This course enables students to predict component failures under multiaxial loading conditions due to yielding, fracture, fatigue and creep mechanisms and to identify these failure mechanisms in practice, and to design against them.

In this course, students learn how images are formed, how they are represented on computers, and how they can be processed by computers to extract semantic information. Students develop algorithms for detecting interesting features in images, design neural networks to perform natural image classification, and explore algorithms for solving real-world problems such as hand-written digit recognition and object detection.  

This course introduces students to the fundamental concepts of normal tissue development and how researchers have used this information to imitate nature in a lab setting, engineering cells and tissues that may be used to model diseases, treat disease, or develop drugs. Discussion topics include: societal challenges for tissue engineering, cell building blocks, normal tissue development and regeneration, adult stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, challenges in imitating nature, cell and tissue therapy, gene therapy, and drug development.

This course explores the materials in electronic devices used to emit light, transmit light, and detect light and shows you how these elements can be combined to create integrated systems for fibre optic communications, solar energy conversion, and displays.

This course gives students an understanding of the fundamental science governing the electronic and ionic conductivity of metal oxides and to then use this knowledge to describe the operation of devices based on these properties, such as gas sensors, fuel cells, batteries, varistors, and PTCRs.