Episodes

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 in Quebec, Canada. The disaster claimed 47 lives and destroyed over 30 buildings and condemning a further 36. As part of the rebuilding efforts, the town saw an opportunity to build back better and decided to embrace the green economy. A large part of the plan involved the creation of a microgrid. This is the second episode of our series in the r...

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 the materials that shape them, the energy that illuminates them and the molecules that heat them. As countries gather in Scotland at COP 26 for the world’s biggest climate change conference, we are releasing a series of episodes detailing some of the challenges facing the world, and some of the opportunities afforded by engineering. In this episode...

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 fit into tight spaces when needed. To work safely and efficiently, they need to spread the weight of the load, and the crane, down to the ground they stand on, evenly and predictably. A lift planner calculates how best to do this with the equipment available within the site constraints. Once, lift planners would work with two-dimensional drawings (or ...

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 investments to boost productivity, improve design and optimise project management. But in the following five years – 2014 to 2019 – this more than tripled, with investors pouring more than $25 billion into construction tech. We often hear that construction is a laggard when it comes to adopting technology, but in this episode we will learn about the i...

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 cities in the world. But now it needs a new vision for the future and in this episode we have partnered with WSP to discover how the UK’s youngest city by demographic spread, is embarking upon a new strategy for clean green growth. A strategy that could create new opportunities for young people and form a blueprint for low carbon development around the ...

As the regions of space around Earth become increasingly crowded with new satellites, the most popular orbits of all are becoming hazardous. Beyond a point, the crowding will reach a level at which a collision between two objects would result in a cascade. The initial collision would lead to yet more collisions until Low Earth Orbit is a cloud of hypersonic bullets of shrapnel. That is the doomsday scenario predicted by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978. But new technologies are being devel...

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 and the physical tools that engineers have used throughout history to work through their ideas and prove viability. Each advance makes it possible to work with numbers in new ways, and the theories produced makes for more efficient mental labour, allowing for the development of new tools. Now an innovation is allowing one of most powerful modern computat...

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 underground. In order to expand its metro system it has turned to the use of hydraulic props to hold back the pressure from the earth during construction of a critical new station. These innovative supports create less waste than other temporary measures. Less waste means less carbon and less carbon means less global warming. Guests Peter Richard...

New software using AI is enabling planners to identify options for engineering projects that are beyond the realms of human imagination. Traditionally, solutions are studied individually at great time and cost but budgets and timelines are more constrained than ever before. At the same time planners are being asked to incorporate more factors into identifying the best solutions from emissions profiles to social value. One thing we do have more of today though is data and in this episode we hear ...

Intensive farming leads to nutrients seeping into the groundwater and into rivers. These enriched waterways deliver immense quantities of nutrients to coastal seas and cause algae to bloom, overwhelming the ecosystem. Fortunately, blue mussels can feed on these algae and also provide a sustainable food source both for humans and for the agriculture and aquaculture industries. Carefully located mussel farms can solve two problems at once and perhaps save our seas. © Main image courtesy of Mont...

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 often. But they must, because the challenge is so enormous that the future of the human race quite literally depends on it. Wheat, rice, sweetcorn, and soybean currently provide two thirds of human caloric intake worldwide. But the world is changing. In the face of rising global temperatures, crop yields are expected to fall… with each additional...

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 will allow clients to build roads that act as carbon sinks. The reduction in carbon by using products like this could play a significant role in helping the UK achieve net zero. The engineers think it might be possible store up to a million tonnes of this renewable biogenic material within the Highways England strategic road network. A single UK h...

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 least 145 million on the roads by 2030. The performance of batteries in this electrified future will be critical. In this episode we are looking at a start-up that is hoping to revolutionise the materials we use to build batteries, just in time for the coming boom in demand. Guest Rick Costantino, Chief Technology Officer, Group14 Technologies Re...

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 long, Canadian companies will have to find a use for the immense quantity of material they generate. Yet the North American reprocessing industry is still young. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a mature reprocessing industry in the UK waits on government legislation to encourage project owners to embrace more sustainable practices. A...

As COVID-19 rampaged across the UK in 2020, society shut down and hospitals reached breaking point. For engineers building The Grange University Hospital in Cwmbran, South Wales their work took on a greater meaning. They had to make sure that this 450 bed critical care facility was completed ahead of time. Their actions didn’t just save lives. They saved money because without it Wales might have needed a temporary Nightingale Hospital. Accelerating construction was only possible thanks to the ad...

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. But during that time, technology has not stood still. Now we are ready to take the next step. This episode we are talking to NASA about the Lunar Gateway, a small space station that will orbit the moon and act as a hub, supporting operations on the surface and in lunar space… it will facilitate communication with Earth, allow for scientific experim...

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 trading networks began to form in the Aegean and the Persian Gulf. Modern cargo shipping relies on ‘bunker fuel’ a thick, black sludge made from the dregs of the refining process. It is also loaded with sulphur, which produces gases and particles hazardous to human and animal health. But the difficulty of settling on a single renewable fuel, com...

Island states are at the forefront of climate change. Rising sea levels mean more coastal erosion, overtopping of defences and salinification of land. More frequent and devastating severe weather events are disrupting everyday life and acidification of the ocean is impacting on fishing. It is happening now, not in decades to come. From atolls in the Pacific Ocean to the coast of Northern Ireland we find out how technology such as Lidar – light detection and ranging, is helping island nations to...

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-building products. Working with Cumbria County Council within an initiative called Adept Live Labs Shell will be publicly sharing the knowledge they are gaining in these lab trials, with the overall objective of helping to build a more sustainable, circular economy. Guests Giles Perkins, Head of Future Mobility, WSP in the UK Keith Little, Councilor, Cumb...

Ecologists on infrastructure projects have some new team members: Conservation dogs. Their superior olfactory systems mean that they can sniff out a plethora of protected species from great crested newts and water voles, to bats and birds. Critically these canine detectives can do this more quickly, accurately and safely than humans. Thanks to pioneering work by consultant Atkins, the use of conservation dogs is increasing and infrastructure owners are seeing the benefits. Guests Aran Clyne, Me...

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. It represents enough calories to potentially feed every undernourished person on the planet, and there is an environmental cost to this. About 6% of all human greenhouse gas emissions resulting from food loss and waste. Target 12.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals calls for halving per capita global food waste at retail and consumer levels by 2...

Every good superhero universe has its origins story. Hagerbach’s begins with Rudolf Amberg, looking to innovate and find new efficiency savings for his iron mine. So began a 50-year journey from testing equipment and explosives, to fire and tunnel safety simulations, and ever more creative uses for underground space. Ultimately the mining industry in Switzerland failed, but Hagerbach survived, and is still an iconic test site for the mining and tunnelling industries. This year it will celebrat...

When people think of digital tools to help with engineering problems, they usually think of a 3D model or a computerised image, representing something that exists in the real world. Machine learning is not that. What it does is completely alien to your way of thinking. It operates in such a way that is totally free from human bias, and completely ignores geometric realities. Machine learning is a cold, dispassionate appraisal of past results, and will allow us to accurately predict the future....

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, Victorian tree planting, and is something Londoners enjoy on a daily basis. Behind the scenes, major organisations and stakeholders are working to raise the profile of environmental sustainability. And despite London’s heritage, more needs to be done to understand the value of the natural environment and the benefits it brings to people. A concept k...