Co-op student having a blast at FMF

Kelsey Towers-Jones shows off a Hyak-2 rocket used in competition by the UVic Rocketry club. The rocket reached a speed of 2,200 km/h, or Mach 1.8, during a recent competition. Towers-Jones is currently doing a cooperative education placement at Fleet Maintenance Facility Cape Breton. Photo courtesy UVic Rocketry

Peter Mallett, Staff writer ~

A university engineering student and rocket enthusiast is launching her dreams through a work-study placement at Fleet Maintenance Facility (FMF CB) Cape Breton.

Kelsey Towers-Jones, a third-year mechanical engineering student at the University of Victoria, is on a cooperative education placement with the Industrial Engineering Section at FMF CB.

She is tasked with making recommendations on how to best configure equipment and resources to improve workplace efficiencies throughout FMF CB, and developing designs and engineering drawings for a number of continuous improvement projects.

The 22-year-old started her job four weeks ago and says she fully enjoys working at the sprawling 35,000 square metre facility in Dockyard.

“This is exactly the stuff I want to do for my career – industrial engineering and manufacturing,” said Towers-Jones. “The people at FMF are passionate about their jobs and it is always great to work with those genuinely interested in what you are passionate about.”

Reaching for the stars

When she isn’t cracking the books or working, Towers-Jones builds rockets as a member of the UVic Rocketry club.

She and approximately two dozen other students meet on evenings and weekends to design, build, and launch rockets in international competitions.

She recently became the rocketry team’s payload engineering lead, and handles the engineering design work to support the payload science team that develops the real “rocket science” on board the rockets.

Kelsey’s club is currently preparing for the next Spaceport America Cup amateur rocketry competition, to be held next June in New Mexico. The competition challenges university engineering teams from around the world to build better, faster and more efficient rockets.

Right now, the team is developing competition ­rockets to reach 30,000 feet (10 kilometers) using commercial off-the-shelf ‘N’ size solid motors. 

Motors for rockets are classified into categories from ‘A’ to ‘T’ denoting the amount of energy contained in each motor.

Each motor letter size contains double the amount of energy as the previous letter – the N motors contain 128 times more energy than G size motors, which are the biggest motors available to consumers without requiring certification.

The team is also developing their first student researched and designed hybrid rocket engine, says Towers-Jones. 

Their long-term goal is to build a rocket to reach lofty heights of 100 kilometers, which is the accepted ­boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, also known as the Karman Line.

“We want to make it to space.”

As a mechanical engineering student interested primarily in manufacturing, she admits that propulsion and space travel are not her main area of interest.

“I like participating in the club because I can refine skills that I otherwise wouldn’t get a chance to work on in school. While school focusses on things like classic mathematics skills, it’s very important to get experience working on things like CAD [three dimensional] drawings and seeing how parts are made, since I eventually want to go into industrial engineering and manufacturing for my career.”

She says her rocket-building hobby is helping with her current duties at FMF CB.

“Rocketry is also a place where I can exercise my engineering interests because it involves making good engineering drawings for manufacture,” said Towers-Jones. “This skill also ties in with my co-op placement at FMF because it helps me practice and make better engineering drawings and designs for the shop floor quickly and effectively.”

Her supervisor Tim Alford, Senior Project Leader, Industrial Engineering, says he has been impressed with her work.

“Kelsey displays a pure enthusiasm in her pursuit of knowledge and understanding of engineering and scientific studies,” said Alford. “She employs this enthusiasm daily in the execution of various engineering and design activities within FMF industrial engineering.”