Engineering Matters

For more than 40 years, The IET’s Young Woman Engineer of the Year Awards have been celebrating the incredible women engineers working to improve our world and shape our future to help change the outdated perception that it’s an industry just for men. These awards are all about showcasing the best women engineering talent in this country, hopefully encouraging the next generation to get excited ab...

Our world is becoming increasingly more virtual, promising new ways of relating to each other and of doing business. The benefits of this, however, are unclear. Virtual and augmented realities could amount to no more than Pokémon Go or Second Life, but they could accentuate the harms we already see online in ways no-one can yet imagine. With regards to engineering, the possibility for the creation...

On concrete paved roads, cracks can be reflected up from the joints between paving sections, into the surface layer. These cracks can lead to further damage to the road structure, and require maintenance from road owners. But the latest road surfacing technology has been proven effective on Formula 1 tracks and airport runways around the world. And now it is finding its way to our roads, helping c...

You have just arrived in a Biosafety Level 4 Containment Lab. These are the most secure laboratories built by human hands, and they are where scientists study the most dangerous pathogens. Containment is an absolute requirement and they are often in isolated locations. They are also extraordinarily intricate, complicated and expensive structures, that often require a large amount of energy, water...

When an engineer has an idea that could change the world, the world might not immediately be ready for it. That is what Omer Keilaf realised in 2012 when he thought he could revolutionise LiDAR technology while watching an advert for the Xbox Kinect. At that time the world was interested in mobile phone technology, which had little use for bulky LiDAR. Fast forward five years, the buzz had shifted...

Once infrastructure projects pass a certain value, around 200 to 300 million dollars, data becomes a major challenge. There is no shortage of data in engineering and the complexity goes up exponentially. Data science is becoming increasingly important in an ever more complicated sector. Guests Tom Goldsmith, Product Manager – Lighthouse, Atkins Marianna Imprialou, Principal Data Scientist, Atkins...

Potager Farm CEO Mario Gatineau grew up in the French countryside as the son of a beekeeper and botanist. When pesticides used in local farming killed around 80 percent of his father’s bees he dedicated himself to finding new environmentally sustainable ways to produce food. Today he is launching a vertical farm in the heart of Berlin. This controlled environment farming in vertical towers is gain...

The engineering industry is only as good as the talent it can attract and retain. In this Engineering Matters Short we follow the journey of a talented young engineer, who found herself unable to connect with an industry dominated by older white men. Now she is set to host the upcoming E&T Innovation Awards in November, an event that she hopes can celebrate the work of engineers to inspire fut...

Standing on the cliffs of Ireland’s west coast you can feel the reason that Ireland generates more than 35% of its electricity from wind power. But what happens when the wind passes on its way east towards Great Britain? When conditions are poor for renewables, a high penetration in the electricity mix becomes a liability. In this episode we look at how nations can, through cooperation and enginee...

When it comes to adhering to standards, working within regulations, and ticking boxes, companies are pretty great. It’s how they are set up, and it is how they are used to thinking. But starting around 10 years ago, companies and organisations were asked to look at the world, and the work they do, in a very different way.  Countries began to press companies to consider the impact of their wor...

Coral reefs are sometimes called the rainforests of the oceans and support an estimated 25% of all known marine species, but they, and the sponges that inhabit them, are unusually susceptible to changes in the waters and the local microbial community. Coral bleaching is just one of the negative effects of changing world. However, teams from a Brazilian University have launched a project to learn m...

This is the story of a structure so unique that there is nothing like it in the entire world. The Falkirk Wheel in Scotland is the only rotating boat lift ever built. Constructed in the late 1990s as part of the Millennium Link project to connect the Union Canal with the Forth and Clyde Canal it is a shining example of engineering efficiency and iconic design. But behind the elegant form is an int...

In partnership with Tabsal SCL, Engineering Matters speaks with Javier Saldise about how his Spanish company is taking waste wood and transforming it into structural timber. The post SHORT: Engineering Waste first appeared on Engineering Matters .

What if we could take the waste that no one wants, the kind of waste that is shoved into landfill and turn it into sustainable fuel? Thanks to developments in gasification technology this is now possible at a commercial scale. In this episode we visit the Varennes Carbon Recycling Plant to discover why engineers are so excited about working on this pioneering new technique for recycling the carbon...

As hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians flee their country which is under attack by Putin’s Russia, we find that the number of forcibly displaced people is at an all-time high. This episode, first run in 2019 and created with Mott MacDonald at the UK Shelter Forum examines the issues affecting shelter provision for refugees. Original Episode 34: Crisis Shelter for Mass Displacement Noorullah Kuchai...

In this week’s episode we will learn about the technologies that have driven the development of electrification for a variety of well-known industrial OEM brands.  Electric motors, high-frequency battery chargers and motion controllers have made electric and hybrid vehicles more and more ubiquitous. And industry is just getting started. Guests Claes Avasjo, Executive Director, ZAPI GROUP Lloy...

Green hydrogen, created from renewable energy resources, has been hailed as a panacea to decarbonisation of heat and fluctuation in natural gas prices. But the reality is that not every application will be either cost effective or practically viable. In this episode we explore the case for green hydrogen and find that its success is dependent on the creation of a system where each part of the cycl...

In the UK in 2020, 80% of freight was moved by road and 90% of passenger miles were travelled by road. It is considered a high-carbon form of transport today, but this is changing as new technology is rapidly making electric vehicles and alternative fuels more attractive.  With the decarbonisation of road transport, its popularity is expected to increase, with traffic levels set to be higher...

Predicting the future is difficult, every year would-be prophets fail to predict major events and over-eager journalists seize on the words of ancient mystics to fill column inches. But there are some people who need to be able to predict what society will need, up to a decade in advance. Developers of skyscrapers need to anticipate economic cycles, people’s tastes, and professional requirements t...

In the summer of 2021 record rainfall overwhelmed river systems across Europe. People in the Limburg region of the Netherlands held their collective breath as water levels in the River Meuse rose. Floods in the 1990s had taught them what devastation flooding could bring. Fortunately, the government had already acted, investing in a unique and technically advanced system of dikes to protect communi...

The 2021 energy crisis saw coal power plants fire into life as natural gas prices spiralled and wind turbines stood idle.  The combination of circumstances emphasised the need for firm power that is also zero carbon. Fortunately, a quiet revolution has been underway in the nuclear industry as Small Modular Reactor (SMR) plans are maturing. With technologies such as Gen IV reactors and fusion...

When Andrew Smyth turned the handle on his clockwork pies on Great British Bake Off in 2016, it brought together two disciplines that had never been combined before. Engineering and baking were combined in the glory of eight mechanised pies. For aerospace engineer Andrew this was just the beginning of a new career as a “bakineer”, a term he invented and has now brought to Netflix in its latest vir...

In this first episode of the New Year, we are telling a story about renewal. A project in 1950s New Zealand called the Kaituna Cut re-diverted a river, draining wetlands to create pasture.  But working against nature can have negative consequences. The process caused the Maketū estuary to silt, and biodiversity to crash.  Now, following a multi-decade campaign led by local Maori groups, a re-...

This week we bring you a guest episode from the Planet Beyond podcast. An adventurous spirit in people has made many successful organisations what they are today. To be truly great, we often find these people are guided by a moral compass, possessing core values that provide that relentless pointer to the right way, even when all plans have turned on their head. Fugro’s hydrographic director Mark...

Humans can feel that we have built a world to live in that is above and apart from nature. We concrete the ground, we regulate the temperature of our spaces, and we shield ourselves from storms.  But increasingly wild and frequent weather events are making us doubt the endurance of our fortress of glass, steel, and stone. Faced with the environmental triple threat of carbon emissions, biodive...