Engineering Matters

#186 Vampire: Resurrecting Britain’s Fastest Car

27 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

On 20 September 2006 Richard Hammond raced down the Elvington airfield in Vampire, the jet-powered dragster that still holds the British land speed re...

#185 Building Canada Line’s Digital Twin

20 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Canada Line is North America’s most efficient commuter rail. Since it opened in 2009, they have operated with a system availability of 99.9% and...

#184 The Future of Old Cities

13 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Net Zero is our 2050 ambition for society, but to make this a reality city must be held to a far higher standard. Our urban environments will need to ...

#183 Testing Times: Building a Megalab

06 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

At the end of 2019 the Coronavirus pandemic began its global take-over, the world had to react fast to try and stop the spread. A project sprung up ov...

#182 Using Gravity to Store Energy

29 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

As electricity grids around the world transition to using renewable energy resources, investment will need to be made in energy storage. When the sun ...

#181 The Foundations of a New Arctic

22 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When picturing the Arctic, people from warmer latitudes are likely to imagine frozen tundra and lonely steppe. Add global warming to this and the visi...

#180 Mining in a Net Zero World

15 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

For industries across the world to reach net zero they are going to rely on mining critical minerals to allow for the electrification of their vehicle...

#179 Trees: Escaping the Heat

08 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In July 2022 the UK burned as temperatures broke 40°C for the first time in recorded history. As each of us tried different approaches to dealing wit...

#178 A Vision for a Modular Antarctica

01 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Antarctica New Zealand runs a critical research hub on the volcanic Ross Island. Originally built in 1957, it consists of 12 buildings connected by wa...

SHORT: Tunnelling on Target

30 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

An era of tunnelling megaprojects has dawned as governments have invested in the underground the world over. Skills shortages are nothing new to the e...

#177 The Abandoned Mine Lands of Wyoming

25 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Founded in the late 1800s to supply coal to the Union Pacific Railroad, the town of Hanna, Wyoming has a proud place in the industrial story of the Un...

#176 Bangalore and the Digital Transformation

18 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Bangalore, the high-tech heart of India, sits a centre of technology. A state-of-the-art engineering facility working on projects across the globe....

#175 Tarmac on the Future of Road Technology

11 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The UK’s roads are in increasing need of repair and local councils are facing a nine year long backlog of overdue road maintenance. However, with ne...

#174 Closing the Building Performance Gap

04 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Buildings can use around three times as much energy as design models anticipate. This is an incredible figure and becomes a real problem when consider...

#173 Europe’s First Energy Island

28 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Denmark is embarking on the largest construction project in its history with the assembly of the first energy island in the North Sea. The 120,000sq.m...

#172 Vaccibox: Revolutionising Kenya’s Vaccine Storage

21 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Norah Magero, the co-founder of Drop Access talks about her invention the Vaccibox. In Kenya a large majority of the population live in remote rural a...

#171 Ultraviolet light: Preventing the Next Pandemic

14 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

For most environments, disinfection has barely changed since the 1918 influenza outbreak; many of the same companies offer similar chemical products w...

#170 Pet Food vs Climate Change

07 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Although ‘pet food’ and ‘engineering’ may not immediately align in the mind, one supplier wanted to ensure its products were both sustainable ...

#169 Ocean Science: Ten Years to Turn the Tide

30 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

This week we are bringing you a guest episode from the Planet Beyond podcast. This is another podcast we produce, and is brought to you by Fugro. F...

SHORT: Making the Big Decisions

28 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Supply chain disruptions that initially left companies entirely without critical materials have given way to inflation of shipping and production cost...

#168 Industry 4.0: Finding the Hidden Factory

23 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1970’s Dr Armand Feigenbaum coined the term ‘Hidden Factories’ to talk about the hidden part of organisations where as much 40% of produc...

#167 Building Allyship

16 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

At its core, being an ally is about support, a willingness to learn about the struggles of others, take them on board and be an advocate for those peo...

#166 Space: The Robotic Age

09 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

As access to space has become less expensive, companies are moving to create an in-orbit servicing and manufacturing industry. In-orbit servicing, rep...

#165 A Road Map to Net Zero Highways

02 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In 2020 National Highways released their 2030/2040/2050 Net Zero plan. The plan laid out three main targets for reaching net zero, first cutting all t...

#164 Under the North Sea: Threat and Promise

26 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In the last century, the tides of conflict swirled around Europe as the world’s largest powers fought for dominance over air, land and sea. The Nort...

SHORT: Engineering Winners

24 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ou...

#163 Nuclear Decommissioning with Data

19 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Our world is becoming increasingly more virtual, promising new ways of relating to each other and of doing business. The benefits of this, however, ar...

#162 Smooth as Glass: The Road Ahead

12 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

#161 The Net Zero Laboratory

05 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 scientis...

#160 Autonomous Driving: Solving the Lidar Challenge

28 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 w...

#159 Dealing with Data

21 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

#158 Vertical Farming at Potager Farm

14 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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...

SHORT: Celebrating the Work

12 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 talente...

#157 Interconnectors: The Green Link to Ireland

07 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

#156 Social Value: How to get it Right

31 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

#155 Coral and the Hunt for a Cure

24 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 tha...

#154 Falkirk Wheel: The Design Story

17 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

SHORT: Engineering Waste

15 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In partnership with Tabsal SCL, Engineering Matters speaks with Javier Saldise about how his Spanish company is taking waste wood and transforming it ...

#153 Recycling Carbon: Biofuels from Waste

10 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 develop...

#152 Crisis Shelter Revisited

03 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 peo...

#151 Electrification: the future of industry

24 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this week’s episode we will learn about the technologies that have driven the development of electrification for a variety of well-known industri...

#150 Green Hydrogen: Creating the System

17 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Green hydrogen, created from renewable energy resources, has been hailed as a panacea to decarbonisation of heat and fluctuation in natural gas prices...

#149 Roads: Invention needs Ambition

10 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 transpor...

#148 Skyscrapers: Predicting the Future

03 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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...

#147 Flooding: Making Space for Water

27 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In the summer of 2021 record rainfall overwhelmed river systems across Europe. People in the Limburg region of the Netherlands held their collective b...

#146 Small Modular Reactors

20 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The 2021 energy crisis saw coal power plants fire into life as natural gas prices spiralled and wind turbines stood idle.  The combination of ...

#145 Andrew Smyth – Engineering with Cake

13 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 c...

#144 Enhancing an Estuary, Restoring a River

06 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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...

#143 Learning From Adventure

23 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This week we bring you a guest episode from the Planet Beyond podcast. An adventurous spirit in people has made many successful organisations what ...

#142 Blue Carbon: The Forgotten Store

16 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

#141 Setting up a Vaccine Factory

09 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

By the end of 2021, 8 billion doses of COVID19 vaccine had been administered around the world. This achievement has only been possible thanks to world...

#140 HS2 and the Golden Thread of Station Design

02 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

High Speed 2 is the UK’s latest transport megaproject. Billed as the largest ever investment in the country’s rail, its first phase will link Lond...

#139 Offshore Wind: Scotland’s World Leader

25 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

At 4.1GW Berwick Bank is planning to become the largest offshore windfarm in the world. This is enough generating capacity to power Scotland’s homes...

#138 Space Resources: The Next Leap

18 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Ever since the beginning of the space age, scientists and engineers have considered the role extra-terrestrial resources could have to supporting miss...

#137 The Calculator that Could Still Save the World

11 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Two years ago the world was preparing for COP25 in Madrid, and we released this episode (#36) about a calculator that was helping countries around the...

#136 The Future of Mobility

04 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the 20 years before Covid-19 the proportion of 17- to 20-year-olds with a driving licence fell from nearly half to less than a third. Even before l...

#135 COP26: Decarbonising Transport

29 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Decarbonisation of transportation and shipping will require us to leverage improvements to green technologies and adapt to new ways of thinking and or...

#134 COP26: Working in a Climate Conscious World

28 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The world is in a climate emergency and as its inhabitants, we have a narrow window of opportunity to take control. And the infrastructure industry ha...

#133 COP26: The Legacy of the Lac Megantic Disaster

27 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Early in the morning of 6 July 2013 a freight train carrying 7.7 million litres of crude oil derailed, destroying downtown Lac Megantic, a small town ...

#132 COP26: Decarbonising Buildings

26 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Every year buildings around the world are responsible for 13.6bn tonnes of carbon equivalent to 40 percent of all emissions. These are generated by th...

#131 Cranes: How to Plan a Lift

21 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Modern construction cranes are highly optimised. They’re designed to lift as much as possible, as far or as high as possible, while being able to fi...

#130 Navigating New Construction Technology

14 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The money flowing in to new construction technology is unprecedented. In the in the five years from 2009 to 2014, $8 billion was spent on digital inve...

#129 A Vision for Clean Growth in Bradford

07 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Bradford in the North West of the UK was at the heart of the industrial revolution. Its world class textiles industry made it one of the richest citie...

#128 Positioning Satellites in New Space

30 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As the regions of space around Earth become increasingly crowded with new satellites, the most popular orbits of all are becoming hazardous. Beyond a ...

#127 Tools for Thinking

28 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In today’s episode we are looking from the dawn of engineering to the modern day, at ‘tools for thinking’. These are the intellectual methods an...

#126 Propping up Vienna

23 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Vienna, the capital city of Austria is also known worldwide as The City of Music and this musical metropolis is fine tuning the way that it constructs...

#125 Artificial Intelligence in Project Planning

16 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

New software using AI is enabling planners to identify options for engineering projects that are beyond the realms of human imagination. Traditionally...

#124 Mussels: How to Save the Seas

09 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Intensive farming leads to nutrients seeping into the groundwater and into rivers. These enriched waterways deliver immense quantities of nutrients to...

#123 Engineering Plants: Intelligent Growth Solutions

02 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The world is on the brink of a climate related disaster. The solution requires a combination of engineering disciplines that do not come together very...

#122 Decarbonisation: Growing Roads on Trees

26 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode we look at how a new plant-based bitumen will be incorporated into asphalt mixtures currently being developed. The hope is that this w...

#121 Batteries: The Lithium-Silicon Age

19 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

After a decade of growth, there were 10 million electric cars on the world’s roads by the end of 2020. This growth trend is set to continue, with at...

#120 Recycled Plastic: The Canadian Potential

12 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In 2019, Justin Trudeau declared war on plastic waste. And single-use plastics were listed as a toxic material in Canada in May of this year. Before l...

#119 The Grange: Saving Time, Saving Lives

05 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As COVID-19 rampaged across the UK in 2020, society shut down and hospitals reached breaking point. For engineers building The Grange University Hospi...

#118 Gateway: The Lunar Space Station

29 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The last time a person walked on the moon was 14 December 1972. Almost 50 years ago. Since then, human operations have been confined to Earth orbit. B...

#117 How Sails Could Save Shipping

22 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The first boats that harnessed the wind to skip over the waves may have been built 8,000 years ago. Several hundred years later, the earliest seaborne...

#116 Climate Change: Islands on the Frontline

15 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Island states are at the forefront of climate change. Rising sea levels mean more coastal erosion, overtopping of defences and salinification of land....

#115 The Circular Road

08 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode we explain how one of the world’s biggest problems – plastic waste can be reused in state of the art, energy-efficient road-bu...

#114 Engineering with Dogs

01 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Ecologists on infrastructure projects have some new team members: Conservation dogs. Their superior olfactory systems mean that they can sniff out a p...

#113 Food Waste: Making a Net Zero Jet Fuel

24 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Every year 1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted. The waste occurs all through the supply chain, from the farm itself, all the way to the household. I...

#112 Hagerbach: The Bat Cave of Tunnelling

17 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Every good superhero universe has its origins story. Hagerbach’s begins with Rudolf Amberg, looking to innovate and find new efficiency savings for ...

#111 Machine Learning: Construction’s Future

10 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When people think of digital tools to help with engineering problems, they usually think of a 3D model or a computerised image, representing something...

#110 London: Boosting Biodiversity

03 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

London is the world’s first national park city, with about 50% green coverage of its surface area. This is a legacy of the public and Royal parks, V...

#109 Spiders Versus Plastic

27 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For millions of years spiders have been spinning naturally occurring proteins into an incredibly strong and durable silk. By studying the anatomy of t...

#108 Antarctica: Building Rothera Wharf

20 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Since the end of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, humanity has focused its activities in the southern continent on science and research. To do...

#107 Africa: Connecting a Continent

13 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Preparation is currently underway for installation of one of the world’s longest fibre optic communications cables. Survey vessels are circumnav...

#106 A Beginner’s Guide to Social Value

06 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Why do we build? Why develop society? And who reaps the benefit? In this episode we look at the new interest the construction industry is taking in...

#105 Solar Grazing at Shaker Village

29 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In a field a few miles southwest of the city of Lexington in Kentucky, a sheep is quietly grazing in the shade. This is a very special sheep. It has b...

#104 Solving Rail’s Hidden Hazard

22 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In 2019/20 an estimated 693,000 workers in Great Britain sustained a non-fatal injury at work in Great Britain. The figure, which comes from the Offic...

#103 A Canadian Blueprint for Net Zero

15 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What is Net Zero? And how can we get there? Can we mitigate the damage of three centuries of fossil fuel-powered industrialisation, with three decades...

#102 Crushing Climate Change

08 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Every two years the Peak District hosts ‘Hillhead’ in a disused quarry. It is the largest event for the Quarrying, Construction and Recycling indu...

#101 Powering and Protecting Scottish Heritage

01 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Along the west coast of Scotland lies a chain of island communities where fishing and farming have been a way of life for thousands of years.  ...

#100 Megaprojects (Part 3): Learning from Experience

30 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This is the third and final episode of our three-part special looking at the delivery of megaprojects. In this episode we examine the lessons learned ...

#100 Megaprojects (Part 2): How to Deliver?

30 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For the 100th episode of Engineering Matters we bring you this three-part special looking at the delivery of a megaproject. In this second episode,...

#100 Megaprojects (Part 1): What Makes a Megaproject?

30 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Megaprojects are among the most complex and challenging of society’s undertakings. Each is grand is scope and due to the scale, none are ever built ...

#99 Urbanisation: Infrastructure for Growing Cities

25 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today the world holds 33 megacities, cities that are home to over 10 million people. As these sprawling urban centres become more crowded than ever b...

#98 The Construction Playground

18 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As projects grow ever more complex, with tighter delivery demands placed on the entire supply chain, a baseline of digitalisation has been essential f...

#97 The Gateway to Indonesia

11 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

To alleviate the burden on its largest city Jakarta, Indonesia is going to move its capital more than 1,000km from the densely populated island of Jav...

#97 (Indonesian) Bandara Sultan Aji Muhammad Sulaiman Sepinggan

11 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Dalam episode ini kami bermitra dengan Shell untuk membahas pengaspalan ulang landasan pacu (atau runway) Bandara Balikpapan – Bandara Sultan Aji Mu...

#96 Fusion: Britain Builds a Star

04 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode we are looking at a project being run by the UK Atomic Energy Authority which aims to build a prototype fusion power plant by the 2040...

#95 Saving Oceans with Science

25 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The world’s oceans are in crisis. Plastic pollution, rising sea levels, warmer waters and chemical changes are degrading ocean systems and the world...