Biomimetic AUV

Most submersibles push themselves along with a propeller. This one had to work in polluted rivers and water pipes, where anything that rotates in open water eventually wraps itself in debris. So it required a biomimetic approach instead, such as a shark.

I designed the shell and the tail drive in Fusion 360, a servo turning a timing belt and pulley train driving a chainlink tail system, sealed against water by an NBR rotary shaft seal and a bearing pressed into a polycarbonate tube.

As you can see, it swims. The design went out as model-based-definition drawings against a 27-item bill of materials at £154 a unit, injection moulded at four thousand a year, with an accompanying draft analysis to prove its manufacturability. Marked 80%.

Pocket-sized inflatable helmet

Helmets are often skipped, particularly by hire-bike riders (myself included), as not only are they awkward to carry around, but you also don’t always know if you’ll be hiring a bike at some point throughout the day. I wanted to know whether one could inflate to full size and still pack down into your pocket.

There were two ways to get a helmet into a pocket, either a shell that folds flat or a bladder that inflates. I tried both, experimenting with origami methods like a waterbomb tessellation, and decided the bladder was the better one. What I have now is a TPU-coated nylon bladder built from flat panels, thermally bonded so that the seams and internal tethers pull it into a dome when it’s pressurised, and it holds 1.4 bar for a couple of hours. Still in progress.

Energy-from-Waste facility design & tender proposal

A city council wanted its residual waste to stop going to landfill, and put the job out to tender as a 25-year PFI. Whoever won it would design an EfW facility, build it, pay for it, run it for 25 years and then hand it back working.

We bid for it. Our facility would take 75,000 tonnes a year and keep 98% of that out of landfill, cost £212M to build, and earn the council back around £87M over the term through a profit-sharing scheme. We took it out as an 88-page tender and defended it to the client in person.

I led the design of the process flow from start to finish, working out what happens to the waste between being collected and power leaving the site. You can read both documents below, the interim pitch and the final tender that the numbers come from.

leonpanjwani.com

I wanted something alongside my CV to dip into my projects further, so here’s my digital portfolio.

It is a single HTML file with no build step and nothing to install. I had not built anything like it before, so I worked through it with AI, specifying what I wanted, testing what came back and rewriting whatever did not hold up.

You are looking at it. It deploys straight from GitHub.

Additional work

Engineering You're Hired, 2026. I led the team that designed and pitched a self-sufficient life-support system for Mars mission expansion. First of nine groups, voted as the most effective solution and presentation.

Computational fluid dynamics, 2025. I had to find the slowest airflow that would keep a 50 mm sphere dissipating 300 W below 650 °C. Three published correlations disagreed by 39% on the velocity and 102% on the drag, so I checked each against its own validity range and found my case sat outside two of them. I built it in Fluent instead, compared k-ω SST against k-ε, and got 21.8 m/s. Marked 90%.

Global Engineering Challenge, 2025. Designed and pitched a sustainable rural transport scheme for Makers Valley, Johannesburg. Came second of six groups and achieved a distinction.