June 2016 NUI Galway Student Receives Merit Award at National Student Entrepreneur Awards

NUI Galway Mechanical Engineering Student, Patrick Costello was a finalist and received a Merit Award at the recent 2016 Enterprise Ireland Student Entrepreneur Awards ceremony.

The project ‘Agricultural Safety Solutions’ was a joint initiative between Patrick, who is from Oranmore, Co. Galway, and GMIT student Brian Melia. The students came up with the idea of a safety device which is installed in agricultural trailers, the Livestock Trailer Restrainer.

Opening the gates of a livestock trailer can be hazardous due to the fact the animals can place excessive force on the gates, with the risk of potential injury to the operator. The Livestock Trailer Restrainer is essentially a gate with a release mechanism that can be operated from the side of the livestock trailer. It puts a barrier between an operator and livestock to allow them to exit the boundaries of the danger zone which is the ramp. The device can then be released from a safe zone to the side of the trailer putting the operator out of the trample path of the livestock.

Professor Sean Leen, Head of Mechanical Engineering, NUI Galway: “This successful design is an excellent example of the initiative of many Irish engineering students and originated as part of the Community Awareness Initiatives Responsibly Directed by Engineers (CAIRDE) second year engineering group design projects at NUI Galway. We ask students to work directly with community partners to conceive, design, make and test prototype solutions to real-world problems. It is highly rewarding to see this type of initiative getting due recognition.”

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