Episodes

Alan Lusty founded adi Group, a multidisciplinary engineering business supporting major manufacturers. He is part of a group that offers engineering services in 23 sectors, with over 750 employees. But he left school at 16 without qualifications, instead pursuing an apprenticeship. At adi Group, more than 10% of employees are apprentices: double the rate set as a target by The 5% Club apprenticeship advocacy scheme. As a Platinum member of the scheme, adi Group has a clear track record of suppo...

Electrification of construction equipment is an ongoing and necessary part of the global effort to reduce carbon emissions and restrict global warming. Sixty years ago, Fugro developed the first commercial cone penetration testing equipment to run on electrical power, and today it is continuing on that journey by electrifying the machine that carries it. What is more, it is employing this battery technology onto a new state of the art machine that goes deeper than ever before to get more data ab...

On two major road projects in the UK work was completed on time and under budget. But not every project can claim such success. Defects, delays and cost overruns plague projects around the world. Projects such as those at Junction 10 on the M25 London orbital motorway, and on a stretch of the A19 near Teesside in England’s north east, are inherently complex. Every change will cause ripples throughout the supply chain, and potentially impact schedules and costs. But this, AtkinsRéalis’s Kelly Bu...

Nature has long served as a blueprint for engineering breakthroughs from the kingfisher-inspired design of Japan’s Bullet Train to termite mounds that inform energy-efficient buildings. Siemens Digital Industries is taking this concept further by combining biomimicry with digital technology to tackle sustainability challenges across entire industries. Eryn Devola, Head of Sustainability at Siemens, explains how looking beyond individual components to view entire systems can reveal powerful oppor...

In this episode, we spotlight the remarkable work of the Lightyear Foundation, the winner of the Engineering Matters Awards 2025 Gold Champion for Diversity and Inclusion. The foundation is the only UK charity dedicated to engaging disabled and neurodivergent young people with STEM. Chief Executive Jeff Banks and Senior Programme Manager Emma Zeale explain how the charity uses immersive sensory science, STEM workplace trips, and specially designed Lightyear Labs to ignite curiosity and boost co...

At a quarry in Turkey, heavy haul trucks are carrying hundreds of tonnes of materials, with no external power. It’s not quite perpetual motion, but it is removing the need for diesel or cables on a hard working site. NUH Cement commissioned ABB to repower a 30-year-old Euclid haul truck. The truck collects loads from a hill top quarry, carries them downhill, and then returns uphill empty. That gave the team at ABB an idea: rather than losing the gravity energy of the load to braking, why not ca...

LongPath Technologies has taken Nobel-winning discoveries, and applied them to a key cause of climate change: methane leaks from oil and gas facilities. The sector now turns to LongPath to establish monitoring across facilities. But as LongPath sought to scale from innovation to commercialization, it turned to Red Pitaya for a vital component. In this episode we tell the story of LongPath, and how their laser-based methane monitoring has been developed over the past decade. We learn how this wo...

In 2016 management consultants McKinsey released a report that reverberated around the construction and engineering sectors. This sector, the report said, was consistently delivering projects late—often 20% longer to finish than expected—and over budget: by as much as 80%. The report’s authors pointed out that the tools that could resolve these delays and cost overruns, quite simply weren’t being picked up. Now, nearly a decade on, has the sector made progress? In this episode, we speak to thre...

Generative AI has swept across our society. In every app, up it pops, eager to offer a helping hand. The opportunity to talk to computer systems as if they are human, or to create memes at unprecedented speed, has great appeal for many. But is it ready to do the hard work at the heart of our economy? Not yet, perhaps, but soon, AI systems will be working alongside humans in industrial engineering offices and on the shop floor. They will present design choices for engineers, guided by a deep und...

Airports are at the forefront of a global transformation, rethinking their role not just as transport hubs but as sustainable, connected cities of the future. In this episode we explore how airports around the world are responding to environmental pressures, technological advancements, and increasing passenger demands. From Hong Kong’s ambitious runway reclamation to Heathrow’s efforts to expand sustainably, we unpack the complex challenges and exciting innovations shaping the future of air trav...

In the second half of the 20th Century, the world was transformed through infrastructure construction. New roads and railways, levees and power lines, delivered unprecedented comfort and convenience, and laid the foundation for an economy driven by easy transport and trade. But today, as many governments struggle with budgetary constraints and the need to balance decarbonisation with growth, that infrastructure is reaching the end of its design life. Design life does not set a limit on an asset...

Helping the next generation achieve their full potential doesn’t just take commitment from their parents or carers, or from professionals like teachers. It takes, as the saying goes, a village. In Derby, nuclear engineer Katie Jarman has assembled the equivalent of a village full of volunteer maths tutors, all recruited from her employer Rolls-Royce, to help local school children achieve their academic and career goals. Working with local schools, Katie and more than a hundred Rolls-Royce volun...

Ben Gibbons and his colleagues at Circular11 are developing ways to add value to hard-to-recycle light plastics. They take packaging, and turn it into a lumber-equivalent, suitable for long term use as post and rail fencing. But to maintain tight loops of circularity, they needed to understand the supply chain they were targeting. National Highways designed a programme to help innovators like Circular11 scale their ideas. The sustainable plastic re-use business, alongside three other start-ups,...

Worldwide, water is in short supply and high demand, with very real consequences for human health and security. Many countries struggle to maintain aging networks, meaning that more than 20% of clean water is lost before it reaches the customer. New industries, like data centres, are adding to demand, as they use water for cooling. In this episode, we look at the work of FIDO Tech, which is using AI and acoustics to identify leaks. The idea of listening for leaks is not new. Traditionally, wate...

On the coast of rural Cumbria, in England’s northeast, a once-secretive nuclear site is transforming its legacy by investing in the engineers of tomorrow. Sellafield, known historically for producing weapons-grade plutonium and nuclear energy, has now begun the 100 year process of decommissioning. At the Sellafield Engineering & Maintenance Centre of Excellence, engineers research and develop new technologies for the nuclear industry and engage with the local community. As the 2025 Community Go...

The past months have seen a shift in international trade, of a scale not seen for decades. New US tariffs have created uncertainty for investors, and promise to spark a global trade war. While these new challenges to cross-border trade are unique, recent years have seen another shift in industrial policy, particularly in the UK, with leaders on both sides of the political divide emphasising a pro-growth, abundance agenda. With such pressures on existing supply chains, and renewed attention to g...

The rise of AI and machine learning promises a revolution in how we live and work. Expert reasoning and mundane tasks will be completed for us in the cloud. But the cloud is not ethereal or abstract. It is a globe spanning mass of physical infrastructure. Enabling this transformation will demand a huge expansion in data centre construction. Data centres house the processing and computing power that the world relies on. Investors have pledged trillions for their construction. But their costs are...

This February, with the flick of a switch, there was a vast shift of power on Europe’s borders. The Baltic states’ electrical grids, built in the 1960s while these countries were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union, had been under the control of Moscow. In one weekend, the transmission system operators in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, working with partners in Poland and across continental Europe, disconnected from Russia, and synchronised their systems with those of their neighbours to...

Engineers from around the world gathered at the Postal Museum in London for the Engineering Matters Awards 2025, presented in partnership with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, IMechE, and Engineers Without Borders UK, EWB UK. In this episode, we introduce the award gold champions. In episodes to come, we will look in more detail at each winning entry. The awards celebrate the impact that engineers have on people and the planet. This year, Gold Champion trophies were awarded to adi Group...

Seagrass meadows are the engineers of the marine ecosystem. They provide habitats, support biodiversity, prevent coastal erosion and sequester carbon dioxide. For this reason Italy has embarked upon a world leading project to map these coastal ecosystems at a national scale, enabling it to plan protection and restoration measures that will improve ocean health and meet legislative targets. This is only possible thanks to recent advances in coastal mapping technology and the sophisticated integr...

We can reuse and retrofit buildings to extend their lifespans, and reduce their embodied carbon impact. But some structures may not be suitable for full reuse: some will have reached the end of their safe life; others will have no viable reuse; and some retrofit projects may require partial dismantling to reduce loadings on the original structure. But demolition or disassembly does not need to mark the end of the life of building materials. With care and planning, these can be dismantled and us...

Quantum mechanics has transformed our understanding of reality, but how did we get here? In this episode, we celebrate the International Year of Quantum, marking 100 years since the birth of this groundbreaking field. From the fierce debates between Einstein and Bohr to the mind-bending implications of superposition and entanglement, we explore how quantum mechanics has reshaped modern science and technology. Dr. Paul Cadden-Zimansky, Associate Professor of Physics at Bard College, a physicist ...

Britain’s biodiversity has been declining sharply over the last 50 years. The country is now one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world. Despite legislation and efforts to stem the tide of wildlife population decline, little has helped. In February 2025, the UK government announced a new approach to reintroductions of beavers in England. The animals’ dam-building helps maintain wetlands and dissipate floods. But they are not nature’s only green engineers. Looming above the charming ro...

At a unique hackathon in Manchester, a diverse group of hackers, coders, and gamers gathered to design digital solutions for the nuclear industry, blending innovation, teamwork, and pressure-driven problem-solving. The event, called HackAFuture, served as a groundbreaking careers initiative, offering the winning team not just bragging rights, but jobs with AtkinsRéalis developing their solution. This was the brainchild of Darren Grears, Director, Head of Digital, Nuclear & Power EMEA at AtkinsR...