From 8th – 12th November 2021 it’s Tomorrow’s Engineers Week. So, we’re joining the #LottieTour with the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) to showcase to young people what it means to be an engineer at Direct Air – today Lottie is in the projects department.

Lottie begins her week upstairs in the office’s of the Direct Air Coventry site, holding work space for 7 different departments within the business and a station for 13 of our very own engineers, using their skills across the West Midlands and surrounding areas – leaving the South West of the UK to our staff based at Direct Air’s Cheltenham site of course!

Before we venture into the service and pipework engineers role later in the week, let’s show Lottie the vital work that happens prior to the on-site jobs by different engineers… project engineers!

What happens in the projects department?

Lottie began her day in the projects office by working on our CAD (Computer Aided Design) system with Direct Air’s Project Engineers, Joseph Donnelly and James Lockwood. Joe and James use CAD to produce 3D models and drawings that give a more detailed display of our compressed air system designs, making it easier for the customer to visualise their system in the lead up to an order. It also allows us to edit the layout of any plant and pipework quickly and efficiently!

Here you can see Lottie is using the unique control panel to navigate her way around the 3-D model on Joe’s screen. Across the projects team made up of Steve Brant (Project Manager) and our Project Engineers Jim Maybury, Joseph Donnelly, Nemo Choudhary and James Lockwood, they all work closely to produce and use other CAD creations including 2-D drawings, renders and wireframe drawings.

 

How do the projects team contribute to the engineers work on-site?

The work done in this team is really vital for compressed air projects, especially big ones, as they often require jobs to be completed within strict deadlines. The CAD system means we a can prevent as many road blocks as possible before they crop up during the project and slow it down.

After working with the projects department on both digital and physical drawings, as seen here, Lottie soon realised that if our on-site engineers didn’t have these detailed drawings to use when completing the jobs for our customers, it would take a lot more unnecessary time and complications.

Pipework drawings are also critical to the Installation Engineers – stay tuned for Lottie’s Tuesday adventure to find out more about that!