Engineering Matters – Details, episodes & analysis

Formula Student is Europe’s top educational motorsport competition, with students and teams from all over the world coming to compete. The competition is integrated into engineering degree courses, allowing students to take what they are learning in the classroom and lab, into the real world. It tests both engineering skills, and the project management that is vital to a professional career.  In this episode, we take you behind the scenes at Silverstone, as this year’s finals took place, with over 50 teams competing across a variety of disciplines. 

Chief judge Dan Jones went from competing in Formula Student, to a career in motorsports. He explains the process each team goes through on the day. But the work, he says, goes on throughout the year as they design and build their car. Jones also explains how Formula Student has played an integral role in helping him get into a career in motorsport. 

We also hear from the teams themselves and explore how these engineering students tackle everything from design and manufacturing to testing and racing. From internal combustion engines, to the EV cars that now dominate the competition and even new AI cars, we hear from teams competing in all the different classes.

Guests

Naomi Rolfe, project lead Formula Student, IMECHE

Dan Jones, chief judge, Formula Student

John Dangerfield, head cost and manufacturing judge, Formula Student

Cara Fox, team principal, Queen Mary Formula Student

Prescott Campbell, team leader, Oxford Brookes Racing

Dash Gilbert, technical partnerships lead, Oxford Brookes Racing

Links

Formula Student

The post #290 Racing for Innovation: Inside Formula Student first appeared on Engineering Matters.

Lean production techniques have become common across heavy industry. They cut resource use, and promote quality assurance. They were inspired by shelf stocking techniques used in US grocery stores. But can they now be turned to the start of the grocery supply chain, farming itself? That is the goal of Engineering Matters Awards Sustainability Gold Champions, Intelligent Growth Solutions.

IGS’s vertical farming towers take components from heavy industry, and repurpose them for farming. Within a structure around the size of a two-storey house, plants and seedlings grow in trays, in precisely controlled conditions. Clever control of LEDs and other electronics, makes the towers energy efficient, and particularly suitable for use with intermittent renewable energy.

For some crops grown in warmer climates and traditionally transported by road or air, these can deliver carbon benefits in terms of reduced food miles. The towers allow crops to be grown anywhere, meaning that land currently dedicated to farming can be used for carbon sequestration and biodiversity renewal. And, by allowing tree seedlings to be grown reliably at scale, they could help boost reforestation efforts.

Guests

Colin Campbell, chief executive, The James Hutton Institute

Dave Scott, CTO, Intelligent Growth Solutions

The post #289 Bringing lean production to agriculture: Engineering Matters Awards 2024 Sustainability Gold Champions — Intelligent Growth Solutions first appeared on Engineering Matters.

The adventures of astronauts have inspired the dreams of many young people. But once those dreams collide with the reality of years of demanding training and study, they often fade. Today, space is about much more than high profile crewed missions. In the UK alone, tens of thousands of workers will be needed by the space industry. 

In this episode, part of a series on Engineering Matters Awards winners, we speak to Diversity and Inclusion Champions the UK Space Agency, and learn how their Space for Everyone tour has helped demonstrate the real opportunities available in space, and the wide range of skills the country will need.

The tour saw a full size, 72ft (21m) replica of the first rocket to launch from the UK, crossing the country. It visited towns and cities without an existing link to the sector, and was part of a fuller programme of online and in person engagement, helping to show young people that their space dreams could become real, and the many paths they could take to join the sector. 

Matthew Archer, director of launch, UK Space Agency

Simon Foster, outreach manager, faculty of natural sciences, Imperial College London

The post #281 A rocket in the high street: Engineering Matters Awards 2024 Inclusion Gold Champion — Space for Everyone first appeared on Engineering Matters.

Britains biodiversity has been declining sharply over the last 50 years. We are now one of the most nature depleted nations in the world. Despite legislation and efforts to stem the tide of wildlife population decline, nothing has worked.

Some Wildlife Trusts and organisations now support a more nature based approach to wildlife and land management. Rewilding is the process of helping nature return to its natural state and one of the best ways of doing that is by letting big animals do the job of wildlife managers.

In Kent, in the Summer of 2022, a family of European Bison, the first to roam wildly in the UK for thousands of years, were released into the Blean Woods. The hope is as they move through the woods, they will interact with the environment around them creating better, more livable habitats for the entire ecosystem.

It’s also not just Bison, across the UK species that once lived here are being returned to see if they can play a role in managing and improving this island’s depleted wildlife.

Guests

Paul Hadaway, Kent Wildlife Trust

Sara King, Rewilding Manager, Rewilding Britain

Resources

For more on the Bison reintroduction project, click here

For more on Rewilding Britain, click here 

The post #211 Rewilding the UK first appeared on Engineering Matters.

Last week the UK government announced plan to ban the sale of wet wipes to deal with the problem of fatbergs in sewers. This week we’re rerunning an episode from 2019 where we venture down into the sewer system to see the largest fatberg in Europe.

Underneath cities all over the UK subterranean mountains of calcified fat are gathering in our sewers as fat, oil and grease stick to baby wipes and harden to form a blubbery bacterial blockage. Removing them is dangerous, manual work, putting people and the infrastructure itself at risk. Special projects manager Andy Howard, who is clearing Europe’s biggest fatberg in Blackfriars, London with Lanes Group, explains that removing a fatberg is not necessarily the end of the story. Unless people change their habits, fatbergs will come back. At Whitechapel, in east London they have already witnessed the return of the fatberg.

Hear Andy describe in detail how fatbergs are hacked, drilled and dug out as well as describe a new phenomenon plaguing the sewers – concretebergs.

GUEST

Andy Howard, special projects manager, Lanes Group

A new report from Lanes shows that public awareness of fatbergs is increasing with 77 percent of people knowing what they. However 85 percent of people had never heard of concretebergs! Full survey here.

SPECIAL THANKS

Lanes Group

Thames Water

Water UK

The post #210 Revisited: Return of the Fatbergs first appeared on Engineering Matters.

In a world of complex supply chains, how can owners secure their assets against risks like climate change and disease lockdowns? By using the concept of resilience, owners can form strategic asset management plans, which balance the level of service required, against the cost of that service, while paying attention to all the risks faced: both by the asset itself, and by the supply chains it is part of.

In this episode, Shiv Iyer and Donna Huey explore how asset management experts can help owners methodically break down each of the risks they face. This approach can be used to bring together large groups of stakeholders, to understand how assets connect to the world around them. These can be modelled over decades, using simulation software from Atkins.

Owners can use resilience to inform their decisions about the location and design of new assets. It can also allow them to update their existing maintenance programmes to respond to new and changing risks, And it can help them win the confidence of insurers and bond ratings agencies.

Guests

Donna Huey, chief digital officer, SVP, Atkins US

Shiv Iyer, technical director, asset management, Atkins US

The post #209 Asset Management, Resilience, and Climate Change first appeared on Engineering Matters.

The first edition of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Whole Life Carbon Assessment for the Built Environment, published in 2017, is a professional statement that establishes a methodology for calculating the carbon cost of buildings, and now infrastructure, from construction, through use, to end-of-life.

The guidelines already allow users to make finely tuned carbon cost/benefit calculations. For example, do the energy savings of added insulation justify the embodied carbon cost of the insulating material? Or, has a building truly reached the end of its life, or could it be more efficiently re-used or retrofitted? If it cannot, can any carbon costs be saved through salvaging materials?

The professional statement is now being revised, and a public consultation is taking place until 18 April 2023. In this episode, Simon Sturgis, who has led the development of the guidance, explains its origins, and the ideas behind it, and the RICS’s Matthew Collins explains how it is being used, and why it is being revised.

Guests

Simon Sturgis, founder, Targeting Zero LLP

Matthew Collins, senior specialist, construction and infrastructure management, RICS

Resources

Simon Sturgis’s paper Redefining Zero, which helped spur debate on the carbon costs of buildings.

The UK House of Commons environmental audit select committee report Building to net zero: costing carbon in construction.

The Bath University Inventory of Carbon and Energy (Bath ICE) database.

The post #208 Counting Carbon Costs in the Built Environment first appeared on Engineering Matters.

For 50 years the North Sea has been critical to European energy. Technology and skills developed over decades enabled the extraction of oil and gas in some of the most extreme and hazardous conditions on the planet. 

As the world transitions away from oil and gas, the North Sea will again be a critical source of energy. In time it will play host to thousands of wind turbines, generating unlimited clean power. 

The UK is targeting 50GW of offshore wind power by 2030. To realise this dream, and future growth, will mean drawing on the experience of the offshore drilling and production industry, as well as new technologies and approaches, as  energy companies look to site and maintain more assets than anyone had ever imagined. 

From anchors styled like spider legs to inspection robots mimicking octopuses; design, technology and robotics advances will be continue the North Sea’s tradition as the offshore energy sector’s incubator. 

This episode was recorded live in Edinburgh. 

Guests

James Faroppa, Director, Marine Geoconsultancy Europe and Africa, Fugro

Pawel Michalak, Global Innovation Director, Fugro

Laura Aldren, Digital and Data Manager, Total Energies

Yvan Petillot, Professor of Robotics and Autonomous Vehicles, Heriot Watt University

Francesco Giorgio-Serchi, Institute for Integrated Micro and Nano Systems, University of Edinburgh

The post #207 Revolution in the North Sea first appeared on Engineering Matters.

The Swedish city of Gothenburg is celebrating its 400 year anniversary in 2023 and as part of the celebrations the city is undergoing a construction boom. For much of the city’s 400 year history, major construction projects have been very limited by the wet and weak ground conditions beneath the city.

This means that Gothenburg, unlike most comparable European cities, doesn’t have an underground metro network or any skyscrapers.

But now thanks to new innovation in construction, particularly in the ground shoring sector, digging deep underground and building up to the sky, can take place on Gothenburg’s weak clay. 

This is the story of how Gothenburg is building its first underground metro line and Scandinavia’s tallest skyscraper, when only a few years ago these projects may have been impossible.

Guests

Sam Oldroyd, European sales manager, Groundforce

Richard Dawson, Senior Operations Manager at Groundforce

Olaf Buerger, Project Manager, NCC

The post #206 The Giant Props of Gothenburg first appeared on Engineering Matters.

In recent decades, companies have moved manufacturing to countries offering low cost labour. Today, as they aim for Net Zero, they must also consider their carbon footprint. And that is almost impossible to do if raw materials are sourced from around the world, from countries with highly emitting energy systems and poor record keeping.

Sam Turner, Net Zero champion for the UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult, proposes a new approach: not offshoring, but ‘greenshoring’. The strategy would see countries competing not just on their ability to supply cheap labour and materials, but on their ability to reduce carbon emissions and other environmental harms.

It’s an approach that has been adopted by Frog Bikes, a manufacturer based in the UK’s Bike Valley, a regional cluster of businesses that aims to develop bicycle manufacturing in the country. 

But the company has struggled to find the data it needs to prove its ability to compete in terms of carbon costs. Doing this will require the development of new carbon accounting tools, and of standards that allow them to be validated. 

Guests

Katherine Bennett, CEO, High Value Manufacturing Catapult

Sam Turner, Net Zero champion, High Value Manufacturing Catapult

Russ Hall, Chief engineer – Net Zero, High Value Manufacturing Catapult

Shelley Lawson, director, Frog Bikes

Jerry Lawson, chief frog, Frog Bikes

The post #205 The Green, Green, Shores of Home first appeared on Engineering Matters.