MEng student worked on affordable frame project for wheelchair fencing

Camille (second from the right) with the other members of the project team

Camille Morand-Duval was part of a team that designed a wheelchair fencing frame for the International Wheelchair & Amputee Sports Federation (IWAS).

The team was led by Dr Ian Radcliffe from Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering, as part of a Sports Innovation UROP program. Mechanical Engineering MEng student Camille Morand-Duval worked on the project alongside Josephine Latreille and Leah Pattinson, both MEng Design Engineering students in the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial.

The goal of the project was to provide a more affordable alternative to elite-level equipment. Camille explains:

“The frame had to be designed so it could be manufactured locally, all around the world. Hence, we considered our users to have little engineering knowledge, simple manufacturing machines and low-cost materials sourced locally.”

During the design process, the team met with a GB squad wheelchair fencer and contacted wheelchair fencing coaches all over the world. The outcome of the project, comprising instructional videos and an accompanying manual, is currently available on the IWAS website and was recently launched officially in an event hosted by Imperial College London.

This is not the first sports-focused project for Camille; for her third year Design, Make and Test project, she was part of a team that designed a performance monitoring system for rowing.

Camille says: "I love working in bioengineering and sports innovation projects. Sports has always been central in my life, so it is something I relate to easily, either by having actually practised it, like rowing, or simply because through sport I have learnt a lot about perseverance, endurance and gained various skills. I see it as a way of expression and communication, it is something which I feel should be accessible to everyone, everywhere."