Engineering Matters

Back in December 2017 the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission set the UK a huge challenge: to create a digital model of our national infrastructure. Known as a National Digital Twin this engineering feat requires secure sharing of high-quality standardised data between infrastructure owners and operators, making operations more efficient and resilient. A new task force...

Chloe is 16 and interested in an engineering career. She is also the daughter of Philip Hoare, President of engineering consultant Atkins. To find out more she digs deep into her Dad’s engineering life story by interviewing him about the projects that have shaped his career. From harrowing tragedy on a bridge project to world...

Growing up in a tiny village in rural Scotland, regular power cuts would leave Lorna Bennet and her family without electricity for days on end. Determined to become self-sufficient Lorna set about learning how to create sustainable energy, from designing water wheels to working on tidal power arrays and testing the world’s largest offshore wind...

Habitat for the UK’s Great Yellow Bumblebee has declined 80 percent over the last century thanks to the loss of the flower rich meadows that sustain them. They now only persist in the North of Scotland, so when Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks planned a new substation in the Highlands, preserving the habitat of the...

After 844 trial tests, and setting his own street on fire, founder of Scottish start-up MacRebur Toby McCartney finally hit on a viable solution for repairing potholes. His idea sought to resurface roads using recycled plastics, and the result is a form of polymer modification of asphalt that uses a mixture of waste plastics and...

Placing the United Nations’ sustainable development goals at the heart of projects can regenerate UK communities. From a new 4km road link that saved a former mining community in Yorkshire, to a coastal replenishment scheme that brought new opportunity to Colwyn Bay in North Wales, we hear how incorporating the sustainable development goals is changing...

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. In this episode we venture to the site...

Could the lightest element in the periodic table be the answer to the world’s most weighty challenge of decarbonising energy? Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe and the most energy dense. Burning it creates clean electricity and heat without generating carbon emissions, but to utilise it, first it must be released from...

It was a meeting with the first Briton in space, Dr Helen Sharman, that changed the course of Sophie Harker’s life forever. A maths student at The University of Nottingham, she took this advice seriously and went on to become an aerodynamics and performance engineer at BAE Systems. Although she is yet to leave planet...

Since 1913 the world’s most famous flower show has been held every Spring in Chelsea in London. This year among the electric blue Persian Slippers, the white and yellow Anthemis Punctata, and the eye catching, deep pink Digitalis Illumination series of Chris Beardshaw’s Morgan Stanley Garden, there is a focus on creating beautiful gardens with...

Norwegian airline Widerøe needs a new fleet of planes to serve its regional passenger base. But it doesn’t want to buy conventional aircraft. It wants a zero emission fleet to undertake its 450 flights per day, and move 2.8 million passengers per year. But so far, no electric planes have been certified for commercial flight...

How did Norway become the world’s most successful electric vehicle market? Last month almost 80 percent of all new cars sold in Oslo were EVs and across the entire country it was 58 percent. Even more remarkable is that the soaring popularity of EVs is despite the lower operating efficiency that batteries achieve in cold...

From additive manufacturing in space, to 3D printing customised pharmaceuticals and non-planar electronics, the next revolution in 3D printing is already underway. In this episode we head to the International Space Station and interview the engineer behind a world first in 3D printing, “The Refabricator”. This 3D printer that can not only print plastic in...

Four thousand years after it was first used as a form of nutrition for the Olmec people of Mesoamerica, engineers are finding new ways to harness the potential of the fruit from the miraculous Theobroma Cacao tree, better known today as cocoa pods. Their solution could provide rural farming communities in Ghana with a new...

As young people all over the world protest over political inaction on climate change, we ask how engineers can prevent our planet’s temperature rising past the point of no return. Responding to this challenge means that engineering professionals, businesses and institutions must do things differently. They must say no say no to carbon intensive development,...

Do plants hold the key to making cities healthier? Could we design buildings that don’t take away green space, but create it? That don’t demand energy, but generate it? Rudi Scheuermann of consultant Arup thinks so. By employing a range of design techniques including cladding structures in living plant walls and engineering bioreactive facades that...

Providing water and sanitation after a destructive military revolution in Peru; engineering with elephants in Kenya; and plunging into enormous pot holes in Uganda, the professional life of civil engineer Brittany Harris has been more eventful since she graduated in 2015 than many engineers’ experience throughout their entire working careers. Her efforts to bring sustainable...

How did a circus act inspire a revolutionary new construction method for Scotland’s first glass fibre reinforced polymer, cable stayed footbridge? Why did triumph and heartache underpin construction of the world’s most difficult cable stayed bridge, the Kap Shui Mun Bridge in Hong Kong? What did tunnel engineering teach designers about construction that enabled them...

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 podcast 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”,...

No-one knows how many penguins are in the Antarctic, but thanks to the use of drones this is set to change as scientists are using these unmanned aerial vehicles to fly over colonies of chinstrap, adelie and gentoos. And that is not all. Academics at the University of East Anglia are developing artificial intelligence that...