The Southern AD Centre (ADSC) organises 7 or 8 events per year, including evening lectures and social events. The evening lectures are usually on a Thursday at either Sussex University’s Engineering Department, Brighton or Ricardo UK’s Technical Centre at Shoreham-by-Sea. ADSC is extremely grateful to both these organisation for providing lecture facilities.


From the Chairman

It is a pleasure and an honour to serve as your Southern Centre Automobile Division Centre (ADSC) for the coming year.

The Automobile Division Southern Centre has enjoyed another stimulating year with a series of wide ranging talks that have been very well received with positive feed back from attendees.

Your committee has endeavoured to follow councils directive of following four key disciplines, namely, "Education; Energy; Environment and Transport".

Our evening talks ranged from large military tank recovery vehicles from the REME with vehicles to demonstrate and clamber over to electric powered bicycles. A further series of talks encompassed various hybrid engines, diesel, gasoline and bio fuels and advanced engine and vehicle concepts.

The centre is greatly indebted to Ricardo's Shoreham Technical Centre and Sussex University Falmer Brighton for providing venues and hospitality for our evening events.

As last year, our key event was our presence at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July: this is rapidly becoming the premier automotive event of the year and IMechE representation is a great professional engineering opportunity. The event is set in the midst of all the major players in the automobile industry sector world wide and enjoys huge public attendance of all ages.

Following the four disciplines, the following were set in place in our prestigious marquee.

Education:

Running in parallel with the Goodwood event, a competition was sent out to primary and secondary schools in the southern centre catchment area.

Over the three days of the event, a daily competition was run for school children aged to 8 years, and 9 to 12 years, with a prize giving at 4.00 pm each afternoon. This annual event was again heavily subscribed with over 200 entries over the3 days, the first two being the children of the Earl of March,  Freddie and Eloise accompanied by their mother and nanny.

All four disciplines were represented by two Greenpower school project vehicles, Greenpower school vehicle build projects being sponsored by the Institution.

Environment/Energy and Transport:

Ricardo provided an advanced diesel system with many fuel and emission reducing features, Ford UK a car and display unit, and Flybrid systems a Formula 1 energy storage unit utilising a flywheel rotating at 64500 rev/min in a vacuum.

 The ADSC committee has in place a stimulating series of talks for the period September 2008 to May 2009. At this point it should be noted that without the valiant efforts of the committee, the successes of this past year would not been possible.

Whilst all played their part, I wish to thank Mike Croker our Treasurer and Daniel Eastwood our secretary and Claire Maycock our Regional Manager for all their help and huge input.

As with all volunteer positions, the committee is the life blood of the organisation and the ADSC is no exception. New committee members are required in order to ensure the centre remains active and vibrant and represents the members' interests.  This is your Institution, I urge you to contact us with any ideas, themes etc. that you feel should be included in our talks and related activities.

In conclusion, I would like to thank all the ADSC members for all the support in this past year, and I look forward to meeting with you in the coming months.

Richard D Atkins

Chairman Automobile Division Southern Centre

September 2008

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