Female engineer for the frontline
by Vincent Ciccarello
Just
how do you get soldiers with life-threatening injuries out of a
battle zone and back to army medicos for treatment?
In an armoured ambulance is the simple answer. But getting a 100kg patient being stretchered by fellow soldiers running to avoid gunfire into the back of a low vehicle quickly and safely is actually not that simple.
UniSA mechanical engineering graduate Sarah Martin has been working to solve this problem as part of the Tenix Defence team upgrading the Australian Army’s fleet of M113 tracked armoured fighting vehicles.
"The aim of this project was to conduct an ergonomic assessment on the various existing land vehicles listed for possible use as an armoured ambulance, and to design the seating and stretcher restraints," Martin said.
"We’ve done the back-ground work to set the requirements, to work out roughly what we can achieve and how to go about it. Now it’s actually sitting down and nutting out brackets, seating, ergonomics and the like."
This final design phase will take place over coming months with the first armoured ambulance expected to roll out of Tenix’s Wingfield factory by 2010.
Martin’s involvement in the project began during a six-month placement at Tenix as an engineering/management double degree student. The placement smoothed her transition from uni student to professional engineer, and led to a permanent position with the company where she is the only female engineer working as part of the design team.
"At work you realise the impact of your design – that your design is going to be out there somewhere where people’s lives are going to depend on it – in a way you’re not confronted with that at university," Martin said.
"The main thing is building confidence and reputation, especially working with tradesmen in a male-dominated industry."
Martin said that as a child she "liked to know how things worked". But she concedes she was more interested in the workings of clocks than in tinkering with cars, which may have given her male peers a bit of an advantage.
"It’s hard to get the knowledge you pick up just by being a boy," she laughed, urging girls to seriously consider engineering as a career.
"Females don’t realise there’s a huge amount of design and creativity involved in engineering. It’s not always hands-on in the grease and nuts and bolts," she said. "It’s about being creative, conceptualising and designing and half the time you might be analysing structural integrity or modelling designs. That’s what interests me."