Scholars visit HR Wallingford

On the second trip of the scholars’ activities week, we went to HR Wallingford centre. Mr Tomlinson gave a ‘what they did as a Company’ talk in one of the offices and then led us out to the testing facility. It had loads of small pools, which had wave generators on one side and, for example, a port on the other. The pools were used to help plan the design of harbours as well as ways in which to manage coastal erosion. Two university students told us all about coal and how they used it to represent sand and there was an interesting machine using a xbox360 Kinect camera to picture the depth of sand around a small wind turbine model. We saw one in action and it was really satisfying putting your head against the glass and watching the waves go by.

Tiger Li