The Engineering Newcomer 2023
Three candidates in the exciting final at Motek
At this year’s Motek, norelem once again presented a special highlight in addition to the numerous product innovations: the awarding of the “Engineering Newcomer”. The winners of this year’s competition were announced during an award ceremony.
On Wednesday, October 11, at 2 p.m., the time had finally come: After the gathered spectators had joined in the countdown, the norelem Academy announced the winners of the Engineering Newcomer 2023. The selected teams introduced themselves and presented their project and accepted their prizes. Afterwards, many visitors stayed at the booth – from experienced buyers to young designers. Both the award ceremony and the norelem products met with lively interest, also among the international guests.
Engineering Newcomer – the competition
The design competition took place for the 10th time this year. It offers pupils and students from a university, technical school or university of applied sciences the opportunity to have self-developed project work or final theses in the field of engineering and development assessed by a top-class jury of experts, and to present them to the masses. This year there were again a great number of project submissions from areas such as automation, food and medical technology, thermoelectronics, traffic and transport. All ideas are examined by experts for their innovative and practical value, their market opportunities, the intelligent and cost-effective use of standard and purchased parts, as well as their very practical handling and function. Last but not least, the technological implementation and the professional presentation, for example in social media, also play a role.
The winning teams – powered by norelem
The Rudolf Diesel Technical School in Nuremberg was particularly convincing this year. Their project “LaWiKran”, a mobile lifting solution for beekeeping and agriculture, won first place in the competition. The team mastered the challenge of completing the innovative crane within half a year while maintaining its compact design. The LaWiKran can be used to lift various loads weighing up to 200 kg, such as beehives and construction bags, onto a trailer. In total, the team used more than 20 products from norelem, such as gas
springs to make the crane easy to set up, ball lock pins with mushroom handles and slide bearings on the base frame.
2nd place went to the Höhere Technische Bundeslehr- und Versuchsanstalt (HTBLuVA) Wiener Neustadt for their “destacking unit for E2 crates”, which can be used in a meat plant. Here it was particularly important to comply exactly with the regulations of the food industry and to ensure the performance of the system so that it can process over 400 crates per hour. Here, too, they fell back on norelem’s large range of products and used several standard parts, including in the pneumatics.
Third place went to the HTL Neufelden with the “KEBA Injection Moulding Simulator”, a small, desk-size model of an injection moulding machine, which should look as “real” as possible and still be transportable. Standard components from norelem were used for the drive, notably toothed belts, toothed belt pulleys and tensioning sets.
All the winning teams were already familiar with norelem as a full-range supplier of standard and operating elements. In particular the clear online catalogue, the free download of detailed CAD models and the quick availability of parts facilitated the project work, according to the participants.