The 7th Global Outreach Programme (GOP) to the University of Rennes Saint-Malo campus was completed from October 13th to 20th 2023. Nine students and two academics, Professor Dr Normah Mohd Ghazali and Dr Maziah Mohamad, from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) Skudai had the opportunity to visit the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF) Techni Center on 18 October. SNCF is the French national railway, a state-owned railway system in France that was established in 1938. The visit to the Techni Centre included a briefing by two senior maintenance managers on the predictive maintenance carried out by this dedicated centre on parts of the trains/lines in France. The briefing was followed by a tour of the entire centre. It was an enlightening experience for the engineering students to learn how parts and components are received, cleaned, analysed and tested before being returned to their respective station/line. The itinerary, which included visits to the industry for each GOP France, was facilitated by IUT Saint-Malo, which also covered the cost of lunch and transport for the visits during the week-long activities.
The students also met with the Deputy Mayor of the City of Saint-Malo, Abel KILNIE, on 16 October and had the opportunity to visit some areas of the City Council office that are not normally open to the public.
Saint-Malo is a historic town on the north coast of Brittany (Bregtane) that was popular with Parisians before World War 2. The students visited some iron bunkers and WW2 remains built by the Germans in the defence of Saint-Malo against the Allies. The nine students, including two graduate students and seven undergraduates, attended a lecture on Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) given by Andre Berthelot, a lecturer at IUT Saint-Malo and an engineer with the Naval Group (partly owned by the French government).
On the last day of the IUT Saint-Malo, Jean-Pascal GAYANT, Director of the IUT, had the honour of presenting the University of Rennes medal to Professor Normah of the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, in recognition of the educational cooperation between the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and the University of Rennes (GIM Department of the IUT Saint-Malo, GCCD Department of the IUT Rennes, LGCGM Laboratory of Civil and Mechanical Engineering), which began in 2012 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/iut-de-saint-malo_jean-pascal-gayantdirecteur-de-notre-iut-activity-7122954434749288448-Ng4H?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop.
