Again, a too early morning. The free day tomorrow will do us all good! Today we were all very excited about the first company assignment. P&G was here for a case study about… SOAP! We had to put a new product on the market in the year 1991 somewhere in Europe. It was a very special assignment, because they were working with “stress elements”.
Tonight, there’s the international evening. We’ve been looking forward to this, because it was an excellent night at beBEC! Woohoow! If you want to see more pictures of the whole event (and us) we recommend you to follow this link.
“Roxaaaaaane, you don’t have to put on the red light. Rooooooxaaaaaane, you don’t have to wear that dress tonight…”. Waking up with ‘The Police’ is good, although it’s still too early. After having a delicious breakfast, it was time for case study number 2; an assignment about traffic management in Mumbai India. We invented the ‘Flexpress’. You’ll hear everything about it once it’s built in Mumbai itself ;-). After the case study, we went for dinner in a sports bar. Great pizza, great dessert!
Just a quick power nap, and then off to the Sexy Alien party, which was a great party! Lots of fun, and err… futuristic costumes!
The fifth and final day of beBEC arrived. We got out of bed, ate some breakfast and started packing, still not fully grasping that we had been able to get into EBEC. Our team was officially one of the best engineering teams in Europe! The rest of the day, we went to an adventure park in Durbuy. We did some shooting, some spelunking, and some kart racing. It was a great ending to a week of hard work. Eventually the day had to end and we had to say goodbye to all the great people we met. We were dropped off at the impressive railway station of Durbuy and went home. Extremely tired, but very satisfied.
We can't wait to hop on the plane to Cluj-Napoca for ten days of awesomeness. It's going to be legen... wait for it...Dary!
Thursday was the first day we all were allowed to sleep a little bit longer, this was very welcome for everyone. The past few days with all the hard work during the day and the parties at night were very demanding, but great fun too. After the good night rest there was the second case-study exercise, this time presented by Elia. Elia is a company that provides a high voltages electricity distribution network. Our task was to figure out how to implement new ‘green’ energy sources in the existing network. We worked an hour or two on our solution and presentation, and felt confident with our solution. The presentation went well and we felt pretty good about it. After the lunch they announced the winner, KU Leuven has - again - won this event.
In the afternoon the main event from this year’s EBEC was planned, the presentation and demonstration of the Team Design exercise, I think everybody was quite nervous about that. The tension had only gone up after the first group had done their presentation. They only managed to load the water and make half a turn in 10 minutes. We were up next. The start went very well and we were fast in the straight line to the water tank. Our loading system performed brilliantly and after only three and a half minutes we were already at the first candle. But then things got a bit nasty for us, we didn’t think aiming would be so hard. Our KISS-Mobil had no separate aiming device, which we seemed to need. So we just did the best we could, aimed for the candle and took the shot. Unfortunately we missed, now we had to reposition the whole car to try again. After we have moved the car a bit we tried again, but we failed again. We found the flaw in our design; we didn’t have an aiming device. We filled the remaining time with trying to hit a candle but we didn’t succeed. Only very short after the 10 minutes demonstration time, one candle went out (because of the water we got into the wax). After this we all were a bit disappointed, we had worked hard, everything went fine except one vital step. But after everyone’s demonstration we felt much better, only one group had managed to put out the 4 candles. Guess who? KU Leuven!
After the demonstrations of the main team design exercise, we were free for a few hours. So we decided to relax a bit in the sauna. But we were relaxing a bit too much and lost track of time. Suddenly someone from the organization told us we had to be in the main room for the prize ceremony and gala afterwards. We rushed out the sauna, a quick shower and then suited-up in 5 minutes. It was from super relaxed in the sauna to stress of rushing and of course also for the rankings. It was time to hear how we did, we didn’t have high expectations, we were here to have fun and do our best. After some speeches, the top three of the first study case exercise was announced. “1: KU Leven, 2: TU Delft…” “What!? We came second!!!! Amazing!”. What a nice surprise. Then, they announced the ranking of the first team design assignment, we knew we won’t be high up in that one. No top three there. Then the second case study ranking came up. For this assignment we expected to be relatively high up, and we were right. We came second again. What a great result up till now. For the last ranking the tension rose in the room, this was the main event. Everyone knew that KU Leuven had won, because they were the only team that succeeded. Actually they dominated the whole event; they almost won everything, the one thing they didn’t win, they came second. But it was still important who came second and third for the main team design. What a surprise again, we came second again. YES WE CAN! What a great feeling. We came here to have fun, and did such a great job. We were all very excited and the best news still had to come. Because KU Leuven had won overall in team design and case study, they had to choose in which category they wanted to participate at EBEC. They decided to go for the team design competition. This was great news for us, because we were runner-up in the case study overall ranking. We would go to Cluj! WHAT??? We can go to Cluj? This is amazing, what a surprise! We were thrilled. After some phone calls home, we enjoyed a nice gala evening with free champagne. Then we had a relatively early night
8 o'clock wake up got even worse. First thing today was a company presentation of Cisco. Unfortunately, they didn't show up. Good thing was that we had some time to catch up on some sleep. An hour later, the company Fost Plus arrived for another team design. They started with a general company presentation, they organize the recycling industry in Belgium. The assignment was interesting, we were given a box with packaging material with the goal to build a heating device. Water had to go from one reservoir to another which was at a lower level and in between we would have to design a heating device that would heat the water by using a lamp. The device would be placed under the lamp for one hour. In retrospect, we didn't really did a fantastic job on this one. We took a juice box for the high reservoir, used some straws to make a channel. Under the lamp, we put a metal dish to reflect the heat as much as possible and made the straws go in loops to let the water stay under the lamp as long as possible. Once the water had passed under the lamp, it was stored in some Styrofoam cups. Just before lunch, the device was set up and the water was poured into the first reservoir. We got some time to eat and to prepare a presentation. We lost track of time while eating and talking and suddenly realised that we only had five minutes left to make the presentation. We quickly made a schematic drawing, came up with some key words for our solution. The focus this time was on efficiency and waste elimination.
After an hour, the temperatures were measured and our results were somewhat disappointing. Almost all water had gone to the reservoir, but much too quickly. It had only gotten three degrees warmer. Some other teams managed to do a lot better. Even with our fantastic presentation skills, we wouldn't be able to win this one. It was UCL who had the honours this time.
After the team design we had the whole afternoon free, for most of us this meant sleeping or getting into the sauna. It was also a great moment for Xavier, as we finally got a hold on some fish food!
Tonight was the traditional international evening. All teams brought some typical drinks and food from their region. This meant an awful lot of Belgian beers and liquors, Waffles from Brussels, pancakes with Stella Artois from Leuven, and a lot more. We, as Belgians, were representing Holland, so we went for the traditional “broodje kroket” and decided not to bring any Dutch beers – as they wouldn’t be able to compete with all the Belgian beers. But everybody loved the “kroketten”, the Dutch culinary image has gained some popularity today!
8 o'clock wake up is terrible. First, we had a short breakfast and then did our utmost to stay awake during the presentation of Thales. They started with a company presentation and then we got the objective of the case study: “Design a space mission to deflect an asteroid heading towards earth”. As four Aerospace Engineering students, we might have had just a little bit of an advantage here. Actually, the only thing we had to do was read a booklet and make a nice presentation. Once we saw the presentation of the guys from Leuven, it was clear that they would win today. Once we had seen all presentations, the jury came together and after giving the usual talk that all teams did a wonderful job, but that there could only one winner, they announced that the winner was:... Ghent! What a surprise this was!
Some time later, during lunch, the guys from Thales had an extra announcement. Apparently there was a slight mix-up. Ghent didn't win the case study, it was Leuven who actually won it. After this, the team from Ghent didn't enjoy themselves anymore and went home. Exit Ghent.
After lunch, we were given the materials for the fire truck and could finally get to do some real work. The big idea was the KISS-mobil, with a large focus to “Keep It Super Simple”. After long hours of hard labour, we already had a robot which could go back and forth. Our simple plan was going well.
The plan for tonight was the Rubik's Cube Party: Wear six different colours, exchange clothes to be in one colour à get a free cocktail! Later that night we also managed to get half a crate of beer just by doing some limboing. (Well, “we” in this case are Maarten and Stein. The others weren’t so into limboing...). We were doing our best to keep the Dutch spirit alive: spend as little as possible!
Today would be a long day. Some of us had to do an exam and we still had to figure out what (or who?) our mascot.would be. For the mascot we just went to the local pet store and bought ourselves a little gold fish. The fish was given the name Xavier and put in a bottle. The exams were filled in and we were ready to go. It took us five hours and a pit stop at home to arrive at our destination, a large villa on a hillside of Durbuy. Xavier didn't look very happy after the rough, twisting ride through the mountains of Durbuy. For the remaining of the week he would rest traumatised on the bottom of his bottle. But here we were, in a large villa, filled with Flemish and Wallonian people. Name tags and T-shirts were handed out while somebody asked a question we had never thought about: “what would Xavier eat this week?” We would have to find some fish food quickly or our mascot would not be able to survive this great adventure.
We had just installed ourselves in our room, when we were called to gather outside for some “get-to-know” games. After having met everyone and trying to remember their names, we gathered in the conference room for the explanation of the main team design. This team design would be spread over the whole week. The goal was to build sort of a fire truck, which could suck water from a bowl, drive to the other side of the table and eventually put out four candles. The truck had to be remotely controlled by a hydraulic system made from syringes and tubes. We got an hour just to brainstorm a little bit; tomorrow we would get the materials and do some real work.
Finally there was some food, unfortunately it was German inspired: Frankfurters with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut. Luckily the food got better every day. :-)
Now it was time for some fun activity: A room rally. The idea: mix all teams in groups of four, tie them together and make them go from room to room to play some games.
This is a story of teamwork, perseverance and a little bit of luck. It all started when a Warren was talking about the very first dBEC he was organising here in Delft. It sounded like a great challenge, so we signed up, no idea of the journey we had just embarked upon.
It was a sunny Thursday afternoon. ING had prepared an interesting case study for us. After a long and very interesting presentation, we put our heads together and tried to come up with the best IT-delivery system. It took us a while to figure out what was expected from us, but eventually we came up with some great ideas. I won't go into detail, but it had something to do with a skeleton and some islands. We presented our fantastic solution, the jury took some time to make a decision and to our greatest amazement, we didn't win. We finished third and went home with a bottle of cheap vodka and a passport holder from ING. Our journey in the BEST Engineering Competition had ended. Or so we thought.
Some days went by, when suddenly we got a call from BEST delft, it was Warren, "The winners can't go to beBEC" he said. "Neither the second team can“, he said next. Then he asked the question we had only dreamt of: "Is your team available to go to beBEC?"
This is how we, four Belgian Aerospace Engineering students got to go to beBEC, representing Delft University of Technology.
Having only finished third in the local round, our goal was simple: Enjoy it! There was no way we could get any further than this. (Little did we know).
Photo 1: our team working hard on the solution during the dBEC event.
Photo 2: Our team being satisfied while receiving our third place certificate.
