Alex Pepperell

MECHANICAL ENGINEER

Skills Overview

Alex is an enthusiastic and committed mechanical design engineer that is keen to get his teeth into a problem. His experience is largely focused on product development, and R&D, working with stakeholders from across the business. Alex has spent a number of years as lead engineer on projects, running sprints, planning timelines and line managing individuals. He has worked within the healthcare and AgTech sectors, working to create high quality solutions that fill customer needs. Alex’s experience ranges from technical feasibility, through design controls, testing, DFM, manufacture, and regulatory submission. He also has experience with software, and electrical design, including embedded systems development and data processing.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT – Alex has run a number of complex projects involving multiple disciplines and high time sensitivity. This has instilled a strong work ethic around planning timelines, task planning, and understanding blockers within teams. Alex understands that stakeholder management can often be the key for seamless project delivery.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT – Alex is a highly effective mechanical design engineer, with experience throughout the product design life. His experience within the healthcare and AgTech sectors means that he is detail oriented, and can produce solutions that can survive in very harsh conditions and demanding lifespans. He has a strong awareness of good design practices encompassed in ISO 13485 and has been instrumental in the introduction of risk management processes for design.
TECHNICAL FEASIBILITY – Working within R&D Alex has spent time understanding what opportunities exist within the physics of a system, before product development can actually begin. This often means taking a high level idea, and understanding the detail of the physical systems involved, where the limits are, and how close we might be operating to them. This is often done by running repeatable tests on mock ups of ideas. Turning this around quickly is one of Alex’s strengths.
DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURE – Design for manufacture is second nature for Alex, and he has extensive experience with design of silicone and thermoplastic parts for manufacture in limited production runs, and mass manufacture. He also has experience with CNC manufactured aluminum and steel parts. For both plastics and metals, his experience is hands on, including working with extrusion lines, designing molding programs, and designing and running CAM programs in 4 axis CNC mills. He also has experience with drawings, designing part approval processes and tolerance analysis.
SOFTWARE & ELECTRONICS – Alex actually studied Mechatronics, rather than mechanical engineering and his competencies in software and electronics have enabled him to work cross collaboratively. He has experience in the design and testing of embedded software systems, particularly those written in C/C++. Alex also has experience fault analysis of electrical systems and PCBA design, specifically within mechanical electrical systems. He has written codebases designed to assist in the automation of testing and subsequently the processing of very large datasets in MATLAB.

Caliber has experience in the Agriculture industry

Caliber Design has experience in the Biofuel industry

Caliber has experience in the Aerospace industry

PERSONAL STATEMENT

I’m a mech design engineer, chiefly in R&D and product development in healthcare and Agtech sectors. I’ve worked in highly regulated, risk management spaces where design process is everything, and poorly defined, high pace environments associated with start ups. I’ve got a fair portion of metalwork/fabrication experience, both hands on and with suppliers. I’ve also done a fair bit of work with silicone, and thermoplastic injection molding, including part design, tool design, and working with the physical molding machines.

Project Experience

SILICONE CANNULA

Alex was project lead on work to create a novel silicone cannula to facilitate the creation of a fistula in an externally communicating setting. This work required developing an understanding of the biological context, and ensuring that the materials and geometry selected were suitable. A number of prototype parts were made inhouse using rapid prototyping techniques.

NOVEL VALVE FOR BIOLOGICAL SETTING

Alex worked to concept, design, and animal test a variety of valves and filters intended to separate gas from slurry in a biological setting. These were passively activated systems, designed to be housed within a 10mm tube and have a low pressure drop to enable high gas flow at biologically relevant pressures.

Paediatric Breathing Circuits

Alex is a co-patent holder for an assembly of plastic parts including those manufactured by injection molding, and foamed corrugate extrusion. This project involved understanding how we could get the most flow performance from an existing system whilst minimising tooling costs. My involvement in this project ended up spanning from conception, part design, plastic selection, and tooling commission. Alex even got involved in the computer vision system used in the extrusion line.

Respiratory Humidifier USA Release

Alex was worked as lead engineer on the integration testing of the humidification system managing a team of four engineers to execute over 900 different automated tests, analyse the data, ultimately reporting results and their consequences to the management of the product group. He also worked to co-ordinate the risk management story and summarise test outcomes for the 510k for the FDA submission.