Engineering Matters

The concept of the Learning Legacy programme has been around for longer than you might think. Starting at London 2012, collating and sharing knowledge, innovation, good practice and lessons learned from major projects has developed in a number of ways to get to where we currently reside. In this first episode we’ll take a look back at other major projects and their approach to knowledge sharing, a...

Timekeeping has been a pursuit fraught with challenges throughout history. From ancient sundials to mechanical clocks, humanity has continuously sought methods to measure time with greater accuracy. Technology has given us new ways to measure time, but also demands more accurate synchronisation. Time synchronisation stands as a linchpin in modern technology, ensuring coherence and accuracy across...

With the launch of ChatGPT, the power of generative AI has captured public attention. Systems like this can not only work through millions of options, like earlier chess-playing supercomputers, but develop original ideas that might not occur to humans, used to working within proven traditional approaches. New techniques of advanced information processing like this, promise to do much of the same w...

Cities around the world face a housing crisis. In countries like the UK, local authorities struggle to finance projects and to find space for development. In faster growing and younger cities, it can be a challenge to ensure services and infrastructure are developed at the same pace as new housing. Urban development requires a clear spatial plan that considers all forms of capital that a city gene...

Sixty years ago a civil engineer called John Bartlett of Mott, Hay & Anderson had a revolutionary idea. He noticed that bentonite clay could be used in a slurry to stabilise the face of tunnels during excavation. This could prevent non-cohesive, water bearing soils from collapsing inwards making excavation safer and cheaper.   The first prototype of his bentonite tunnel boring machine was...

Social Value is a term that has been used to mean the additional benefits a company can provide to wider society beyond their business as usual. In the built environment, where infrastructure projects can already lead to negative consequences for local communities, considering how a company or project can provide real opportunities and benefits to locals is hugely important. There is a shifting la...

Digitalisation is changing every part of the economy. Modern mobile cranes have been developed based on some of the most fundamental concepts in engineering, many of which were first described by Archimedes. But here too, advances in sensors, computing power, and data transfer have been transformational. What can this meeting of modern and ancient tell us about how we design complex, safety critic...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over two weeks of episodes, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider i...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over two weeks of episodes, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider i...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over two weeks of episodes, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider i...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over two weeks of episodes, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider i...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over two weeks of episodes, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider i...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over two weeks of episodes, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider i...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over two weeks of episodes, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider i...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over two weeks of episodes, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider i...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over the next two weeks, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider impa...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over the next two weeks, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider impa...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over the next two weeks, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider impa...

This March, the industry will gather at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London, for the inaugural Engineering Matters Awards . Over the next two weeks, we’ll be introducing all of the shortlisted entries. The Awards will demonstrate why engineering matters. We’ll be sharing some exciting innovations. And we will be looking at a range of ways engineers and those in related fields can have a wider impa...

The use of “The Observational Method” could be one of the best kept secrets of the engineering world. Time and time again it has been used to deliver world leading projects safely and cost effectively. In some cases it has been the only way forward when other methods have failed. The powerful methodology has been used for several decades to minimise risk and maximise efficiency on some of the worl...

The modern world is bound together with cables. As our economy moves to the cloud, the vast majority of data traffic passes through subsea cables. As we transition to renewable energy, hundreds of kilometres of cabling are needed within each wind farm, and to connect wind farms to the shore. When the first cables were laid, in the 19th century, we learned that the seabed was not geologically and b...

Are there really bodies buried in the Hoover Dam? Was the hard hat really invented here in 1931? And why was it originally called Boulder Dam? In this episode, first aired in 2019, we explore and uncover the secrets of one of the greatest engineering projects ever built. The unique and formidable Hoover Dam. Learn about the “Double Ugly”, “Hurry Up Crowe” and a cast of other characters that brough...

In this podcast we go back in time to the invention of cathodic protection 200 years ago by President of the Royal Society Sir Humphry Davy. Initially applied to ships and pipelines, Mott MacDonald has spent decades pioneering its use on civil infrastructure designing systems for bridges and buildings around the world. This innovative thinking is preserving and protecting structures saving asset o...

From tireless assembly lines in bustling factories to the delicate precision of diamond cutting, robots are transforming industries by becoming superhuman coworkers. But what if we shrunk these tireless partners down to the size of a grain of rice? Enter the realm of microrobots, where the boundaries of automation shrink to the scale of a pinhead, opening up a universe of possibilities. Starting w...

What would it mean to be able to look at a bag of concrete, and see its embodied carbon? That’s the goal of the new benchmark rating scheme for concrete, developed by the UK Low Carbon Concrete Group . It will allow suppliers, contractors and developers to consider the carbon footprint of projects, alongside cost and performance. Novel material types—including ternary concretes and alkali-activate...