Just thought I’d update those who are interested, and who made useful contributions to this thread. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to instigate a unicycling related fourth year research project, I couldn’t find an exact specification for a project which was felt to be sufficiently taxing yet possible.
So what am i doing instead?
Well hopefully, designing and building a quartz-ported titanium piston for the ‘optical’ engine in the engine lab. Basically this is an engine adapted such that you can see in to the combustion chamber through a quartz section in the crown of the piston. Currently they are using perspex pistons that only last 50 engine cycles. Titanium pistons with small quartz ports in them have been made but you lose abot half an inch all the way round the edge, doesn’t sound much but the bit you can see apparently contains only 2.5% of the information they want to record, so it’s pretty useless. The solution? Glue a quartz block which has an internal concave lens on to the top of a titanium piston, which is then friction welded to an aluminium piston. Looks to be a really interesting project.
You could ride this like a regular uni, up to the top of the hill. Then turn a knob on the hub to make it a free wheel.
I suggest fittings mooth brakes and having a lot of talent. A full motorcycle road race suit would be about right . And insurance and a will.
Still, how cool to just fly like that.
So, 9 months, and roughly £10,000 later here is the finished article. My paper is due to be published in amonth or two with any luck. The internal compexity of this thing is fiendish, can’t wait for the engine testing.
budget? what budget! Looks nice- what is the purpose of being able to see in a piston chamber though? surely there are non optical ways of finding out the same info? Tell us how the tests go. Congrats on finishing your project
mark
yes well, as this project is being funded by a well-known luxury car manafacturere I didn’t have to stick to the standard project budget, that would only have counted if I’d come up with my own project The materials for this single piston ran to nearly £1k, and manafacturing required hiring a machinist for over a month straight.
Being able to see the injection and combustion is vital for: flame front analysis, soot particle tracing, three colour pyrometry, injection spray analysis. The engine also has high-speed data aquisition of all sorts of parameters going, data from which is processed and analysed along with the photographs. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific or show pictures but there are major legal issues at the moment. Once published, it will be public domain.
Titanium, spectrosil B fused quartz silica, copper, Torlon 4301 and some aluminium alloy. Oh and a lot of loctite 272. There is actually a similar thing, although vastly inferior, for a K series knocking round the lab, but you really would not want to run it in a road car.
And insurance and a will. 
