Jamie Benwell

The assembly line tracked over 2,500 jigs and tools with paper checklists and spreadsheets, with no real-time visibility, no audit trail, and frequent mismatches between what was recorded and what was actually on the line. I proposed a digital replacement on day one of my placement, then taught myself Oracle APEX and SQL from scratch to build it.

His jig scanning project has shown the depth of knowledge. Jamie has self-learnt (APEX software etc.) and then delivered to ensure it was successful. Tom Vaughan, Production Group Leader, Rolls‑Royce Motor Cars

• Designed and built the full application end to end: QR-code scanning, live status dashboards, and automated fault alerts sent the moment a jig fails a check.
• Designed a custom authentication scheme to work around handheld-device limitations, later adopted as a recommended standard for other production apps across the business.
• Rolled the system out to the entire assembly line, working directly with 400+ associates and managers across the plant.
• Documented and trained a permanent team member to take over the app, so it outlives the placement.

Nominal CAD geometry is rarely what actually ships. This dissertation quantifies how real manufacturing tolerances on an engine mounting bracket affect stiffness and fatigue life, extending the DOE-driven FEA approach I used on my Year 2 bracket project into a fatigue problem rather than a static one, and asking where tight tolerances actually earn their cost and where they're wasted spend.

• Modelling a family of as-manufactured bracket variants across a realistic tolerance band, rather than assuming the nominal design is what gets built.
• Running fatigue life predictions under quasi-static load envelopes representative of real driving conditions.
• Direct extension of the FEA/DOE optimisation methodology from my EG264 bracket project, applied to fatigue rather than static strength.

Designing, simulating, and 3D-printing a scale RC car body modelled on the Jaguar E-Type, then engineering a bespoke aero package, splitter, diffuser, and rear wing, and validating it against the stock silhouette through CFD and on-track A/B testing. The real question I'm answering: how much aerodynamic performance can be extracted from a 1960s road-car shape without losing what makes it an E-Type.

• Eight-stage development pipeline: reference lock, base CAD, aero CAD, CFD validation, 3D-printed body, static aero testing, on-track A/B testing, full writeup.
• Designing a bespoke electronics fitment to package the RC internals inside the scaled body, and learning to solder from scratch to wire it myself.
• Benchmarking CFD-predicted and on-track performance of the stock E-Type shape directly against my modified aero package, not just claiming an improvement.

Built without writing code in the traditional sense, using AI tools as the primary development method throughout. The app targets a specific gap I'd hit myself after years of casual app-based learning: vocabulary without real conversational fluency.

• Designed, built, and shipped independently: scoping, product decisions, and iteration all AI-assisted.
• Focused on spoken fluency and real usage rather than gamified vocabulary drilling.
• Learned to specify features precisely before generating them. Every screen started as a written description of behaviour, not a vague prompt, because vague prompts produced unusable output.
• Built a working sense of where AI genuinely accelerates development (UI, boilerplate, iteration speed) versus where it still needs a human call (pedagogy, conversation pacing, what "correct" Swedish actually sounds like).
• That workflow carried straight back into my placement. I used the same AI-assisted approach to speed up dashboard and reporting work at Rolls-Royce.

Selected work from first and second year, included to show where the placement-year skills started.

Sim-Racing Wheel & Phone Mount First

Individual coursework, Year 2 (EGA266): product design, from brief to manufactured part

Brief: design a computer peripheral that goes beyond aesthetics. I designed a phone-mount attachment for a Logitech G920 wheel that turns any racing sim into a live telemetry dashboard, benchmarked against real market products, then taken through concept generation, a weighted Pugh matrix, and iterative 3D-printed prototyping.

• Scored three concepts against a weighted Pugh matrix across 8 criteria, then combined the two winning concepts into the final hybrid design.
• Test prints failed twice, once from tolerance issues and once from fractured mounting points, and I redesigned wall thickness and fillets in response rather than just resubmitting the same part.

2.2Nm torque withstood (spec: 2–2.5Nm) 269g total mass £7.49 build cost

FEA-Optimised Steel Bracket First

Individual coursework, Year 2 (EG264, Computer Aided Engineering)

Took a deliberately over-engineered bracket (safety factor 6.03 against a 4000N load) and optimised it down using a 16-run Taguchi design of experiments across four variables, validating every candidate with FEA before picking a winner. Then stress-tested that winner at 60°C and reported honestly that it didn't hold up.

• Ran a mesh-convergence study first (16mm down to 4mm elements) so the FEA results could actually be trusted before comparing designs.
• Selected the optimal run by safety factor, stress, displacement and mass together, not by any single metric in isolation.
• Flagged a genuine limitation in the conclusion: the optimised design fails at 60°C, and proposed a specific redesign rather than hiding the result.

130g lighter than baseline SF 2.76 (target 2–3) 16 design iterations simulated

IMechE Design Challenge: Autonomous Repeatable Vehicle First

First-year team project, Group 22 (6 members), Institution of Mechanical Engineers challenge

Build a vehicle that drives 4 metres to a wall and back within two minutes, as accurately as possible, using analogue electronics only, no microcontrollers and no digital logic. I modelled the tank-track drivetrain and running gear in CAD.

• Modelled the drivetrain and running gear. My CAD submission scored 100%.
• Built the stopping/timing logic around SR-latch relay circuitry, simplified from an initial transistor-based design after ambiguity over what components were permitted.
• Iterated wheel and shaft geometry through several laser-cut revisions to fix track slip and alignment.

Team of 6 Analogue electronics only 406.3g total mass

I build the things I think should already exist. At Rolls‑Royce, that was a tracking system now used by 300+ people every shift, saving the company £55,600. At home, it's a bespoke aero package engineered for a scale E-Type and an AI-built app that taught me more Swedish than five years of casual apps ever did. Final-year Mechanical Engineering, Swansea University: precision engineering on paper, motorsport in the blood.