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Rory Kilgarriff
Mechanical Engineering student | Suspension Engineer with UCD Formula Student
Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland
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Experience Level:
Student / Intern
Desired Job Role:
Race Engineer / Pit Crew
Experience:
Since joining the UCD Formula student team I have learned a huge amount from Engineering first principles approach, problem solving, designing within strict budgets and designing with manufacture in mind. Starting my career using my experience in CAD designing odd parts between the Suspension and braking team as well as the bodywork and ergonomics team. In particular I was tasked with designing and mounting the firewall.
In my second year I increased my involvement, spending my time solely on the suspension team. I was tasked with designing a front anti roll bar, performing FEA analysis designing a front rocker and anti roll bar system. However, the design was halted and it was decided to stick to direct actuation for economic reasons and to focus on bringing our first mechanically complete EV to the competition. From this point my focus was on finding the front damper location and designing the appropriate mounts and pushrod. I also designed the suspension lugs as well as all welding jigs for suspension lugs. I was heavily involved in completing the cost and design reports and presented during the design event in Silverstone 2024. This year also culminated in the first mechanically finished EV car in UCDFS history.
Seeking to fix administrative issues from the previous year and inspired by the helpdesk systems used by Ericsson and many other IT companies, I decided to implement a similar system on our team. Hosting, setting up and administrating the open source helpdesk, OSTicket. On my PC I ran an Apache server on a Linux virtual machine. Using ngrok I hosted the website publicly. I am 1 of 3 students who have created an Excel spreadsheet that when given necessary inputs will return every important characteristic of the car. Currently my focus is on suspension and redesigning the rear suspension. I will be designing the camber characteristics and locating suspension nodes. Due to this I will be heavily involved in chassis design. Once this is finished, I am 1 of 2 students tasked to fully revamp and understand the design event documents and to eventually redesign the 2026 UCD Formula Student car.
I I have also spent 2 years in secondary schools competing in the F1 in schools Ireland Competition, placing 3rd in Ireland in 2020 and competing in the 2020 World Finals. As head design engineer, my cars have won Best Engineered Car in Ireland, 2 years in a row. I was also one of 9 Facebook Engineer of the Future award. I learned the importance of iterative design. I produced 7 new chassis designs with 46 wings between them. Testing each design with Solidworks and Ansys Computational Fluid Dynamics as well as Solidworks Finite Element Analysis. Promising designs were 3D printed and tested. Here is where I learned to design parts to be manufactured as well as the importance of physical testing to verify performance of virtual testing. A makeshift wind tunnel was created and used to this end.
Since ending my time in the competition, I have been asked back to my school to give advice and assistance to more recent teams. I have also been a judge for the the 2023 Irish National Finals. This involved setting up the competition area, judging the portfolios against a strict rubric and interviewing the teams about said portfolios. I also oversaw racing. It was a pleasure to assist in the competition that has helped me so much. I was invited back to judge the 2024 Irish National Finals but unfortunately had prior commitments.
I have also gained experience with engineering in a professional environment as a Software Engineer. In May 2023, I took part in a paid internship over summer as part of the Ericsson Bursary Program. I worked on Radio Access Network slicing as part of a scrum. This involved implementing Kubernetes code onto a cluster of nodes that makes up a network in order to "slice" the mobile network to provide the required speeds, latencies and bandwidth for customers. This involved working with Linux, Kubernetes and a small amount of Python. Working in a team I presented during daily standups and experienced the reality of working as an engineer.
In May 2024, I took part in a paid internship once again. This time I was working with Ericsson Service Orchestration and Assurance. I was involved with the general release that involved the product I was working with the previous year. This year I was particularly focused on bug fixes and quality of life changes. I was using similar softwares to the previous internship, with an additional focus on Docker and automation and building softwares such as Bob and Jenkins. I also produced scripts in Bash, a shell script language.
In my second year I increased my involvement, spending my time solely on the suspension team. I was tasked with designing a front anti roll bar, performing FEA analysis designing a front rocker and anti roll bar system. However, the design was halted and it was decided to stick to direct actuation for economic reasons and to focus on bringing our first mechanically complete EV to the competition. From this point my focus was on finding the front damper location and designing the appropriate mounts and pushrod. I also designed the suspension lugs as well as all welding jigs for suspension lugs. I was heavily involved in completing the cost and design reports and presented during the design event in Silverstone 2024. This year also culminated in the first mechanically finished EV car in UCDFS history.
Seeking to fix administrative issues from the previous year and inspired by the helpdesk systems used by Ericsson and many other IT companies, I decided to implement a similar system on our team. Hosting, setting up and administrating the open source helpdesk, OSTicket. On my PC I ran an Apache server on a Linux virtual machine. Using ngrok I hosted the website publicly. I am 1 of 3 students who have created an Excel spreadsheet that when given necessary inputs will return every important characteristic of the car. Currently my focus is on suspension and redesigning the rear suspension. I will be designing the camber characteristics and locating suspension nodes. Due to this I will be heavily involved in chassis design. Once this is finished, I am 1 of 2 students tasked to fully revamp and understand the design event documents and to eventually redesign the 2026 UCD Formula Student car.
I I have also spent 2 years in secondary schools competing in the F1 in schools Ireland Competition, placing 3rd in Ireland in 2020 and competing in the 2020 World Finals. As head design engineer, my cars have won Best Engineered Car in Ireland, 2 years in a row. I was also one of 9 Facebook Engineer of the Future award. I learned the importance of iterative design. I produced 7 new chassis designs with 46 wings between them. Testing each design with Solidworks and Ansys Computational Fluid Dynamics as well as Solidworks Finite Element Analysis. Promising designs were 3D printed and tested. Here is where I learned to design parts to be manufactured as well as the importance of physical testing to verify performance of virtual testing. A makeshift wind tunnel was created and used to this end.
Since ending my time in the competition, I have been asked back to my school to give advice and assistance to more recent teams. I have also been a judge for the the 2023 Irish National Finals. This involved setting up the competition area, judging the portfolios against a strict rubric and interviewing the teams about said portfolios. I also oversaw racing. It was a pleasure to assist in the competition that has helped me so much. I was invited back to judge the 2024 Irish National Finals but unfortunately had prior commitments.
I have also gained experience with engineering in a professional environment as a Software Engineer. In May 2023, I took part in a paid internship over summer as part of the Ericsson Bursary Program. I worked on Radio Access Network slicing as part of a scrum. This involved implementing Kubernetes code onto a cluster of nodes that makes up a network in order to "slice" the mobile network to provide the required speeds, latencies and bandwidth for customers. This involved working with Linux, Kubernetes and a small amount of Python. Working in a team I presented during daily standups and experienced the reality of working as an engineer.
In May 2024, I took part in a paid internship once again. This time I was working with Ericsson Service Orchestration and Assurance. I was involved with the general release that involved the product I was working with the previous year. This year I was particularly focused on bug fixes and quality of life changes. I was using similar softwares to the previous internship, with an additional focus on Docker and automation and building softwares such as Bob and Jenkins. I also produced scripts in Bash, a shell script language.
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