Beginning of the third year

Due to this I, will directly receive Master’s degree upon completion of my course, in contrast to students reading other subjects who get Bachelors.  In spite of this not being my last year I still have so-called finals. These are exams consisting of all work from the past three years. The challenge I face this year is to manage both revision of work from previous years and learning new courses this year which will also be examined in finals. These new courses are taught mainly in lectures and classes (in contrast to usual personal tutorials).

Even before the first week of this trimester has started we had have to as usually sit ‘collections’. Collections are basically exams which don’t count. They are mainly meant to provide us an insight on our ‘readiness ‘ and are good way to practise before the real ‘finals’ as they are based on the questions from past papers. I managed to get quite high grades in them which had taken away some stress from me and gave me confidence for the forthcoming intense preparation for ‘finals’. In the following first three weeks of this term we didn’t have any lectures nor tutorials. All our time was spent on the Team Design Project.

Team Design Project is a complex task based on solving a very vaguely defined industrial engineering problem and providing an analysis to prove that this solution is financially profitable. In a team of seven students we had to write up a paper of approximately 20 000 words which describes our approach to the problem, physical background, the design of our solution and an analysis of the market. Our assignment was: ‘Design of joints for superconducting wires for magnetic applications’. After we found out that the largest market (5.5 billion dollars per year) is purchase of magnetic resonance devices (MRIs) for hospitals we decided to focus on superconductors for MRIs. The main component of an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is the coil of superconducting wire made of NbTi (Niobium Titanium) which creates a super strong magnetic field (30 000 times stronger than magnetic field of the earth). The problem arises however from the length of the wire required for these coils. One such coil needs a wire of length of approximately 50 km. Nonetheless we are only able to make wires of 1-5 km. Therefore we need to join these wires together to get 50 km. Unfortunately, these joints don’t have the superconductive properties of the wires. Because of this they have to be specially cooled and magnetically shielded. We tackled the task from general point of view and set ourselves a challenge to replace the NbTi wires with more efficient MgB2. MgB2 (magnesium diboride) is lighter, widely available material which works as a superconductor at higher temperatures: 30 K (-243°C) compared to current 4 K (-269°C). All these properties make it commercially very attractive. (Yes, when you undergo an MRI scan there is temperature very close to absolute zero around you!) For production of our joints we chose so-called Spark Plasma Sintering technique which no-one has used before for superconducting joints and we proposed theoretical design which solves some technological challenges related to this method.

This project has been the most interesting and exciting part of my course at Oxford so far. It required team work, regular meetings, and mutual confidence that everyone will do their part of the project well. I believe these are the requirements which one has to meet in a real work where one has to solve problems and work on team projects. We also had the opportunity to be in contact with two companies – Siemens and Oxford Instruments which allowed us to actually see the production of MRI devices. Besides written work we also had to present our work with powerpoint in front of a committee. This three-week project has been very interesting way how to acquire new experience and knowledge. Upon its completion our options courses have started.
From the options we had I chose the courses „Engineering Ceramics“, „Strength and Failure of Materials a „Nanomaterials“. Because this is already the third year the courses go in depth and are much more interesting than the modules in our first and second year.

Besides the work for my course I have also attended a dinner and presentation given by the CEO of Czech National Bank, Miroslav Singer, organised by the Czech and Slovak society. Miroslav Singer in his presentation has compared and concluded Czech and Slovak economy – he emphasised the rapid increase of Slovak economy on the expense of their national debt. He also mentioned that Czech and Slovak Republic are European countries with exceptionally good export and import.

As I already mentioned at the beginning the main challenge for me this year is to manage preparation for finals – both revision from this year’s options classes and last year’s material. This is a good example of contrast of Czech and English education system. In the Czech Republic it is common to sit exams very often and this leads to usual mechanical memorising of work which is well forgotten within couple of weeks. Opposite to this Oxford put emphasis on understanding which if you lack you have no chance to remember material taught two years ago.

If you as a potential UK university applicants have any question please don’t hesitate to contact me either via my email or my facebook profile.