A team from The University of Queensland has made it through to the final round of the Airbus Fly Your Ideas global competition for students of higher education.
The UQ team will be competing for the top position with four other teams from Singapore, the Czech Republic, Spain and the US.
A prize of €30,000 will be awarded to the winning team.
The finalists were selected from 225 teams from 82 countries worldwide which originally qualified for the three-round competition, launched last October. The goal of the competition is to challenge students to come up with innovative ideas to shape the future of aviation. Of the original 225 teams, 86 made it into the second round which began in January.
The three person UQ team, named "COz", comprises team leader Michael Heitzmann and Alex Ng, PhD students in Mechanical Engineering, together with Benjamin Lindenberger who is undertaking his University of Stuttgart diploma thesis at UQ. The team was chosen for its project to use bio-composite materials made from castor plant fibres in aircraft passenger cabins.
Over the next month the five teams in the final round will put the finishing touches to their projects with the help of an Airbus coach. The teams will then be flown to Paris courtesy of Airbus to make their final presentations before a jury of five Airbus representatives and five independent industry experts at the world famous Paris Air Show on 19 June.
In addition to the first prize of €30,000, 15,000 euros will go to the runner-up, and an additional 5,000 euros to the team chosen by Airbus staff as the "Employees Choice" prize.
Ted Porter, spokesman for Airbus in Australia, said the quality of the entries received in Australia was very impressive and showed the high level of talent being nurtured at our universities in aerospace-related subjects.
UQ Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor Martin Veidt said the team had shown "tremendous creativity and high quality science to develop a pioneering natural fibre composite from a single plant."
"The product has great potential for applications in the aeronautical industry to substantially reduce the carbon footprint by enabling the manufacturing of fully recyclable polymer components.
"The team has to be congratulated for executing the project from conceptual idea all the way through to the finished product."
In addition to UQ, the other finalists are from Stanford University in the US, the National University of Singapore, Valencia Polytechnic in Spain and Brno University in the Czech Republic.
Images are available by contacting k.poole@uq.edu.au.
Media: Trent Leggatt, School of Engineering, UQ tel 07 3346 9976 or Ted Porter, Airbus Media Australia, Tel: 02 9436 0200; 0418 468 269
