Episodes

In 1985 diver Henri Cosquer discovered a submerged cave entrance in the Mediterranean near Marseilles. Exploring over the next six years he discovered a chamber filled with prehistoric art. Conditions in the caves and the submerged passages leading to it are extremely dangerous: three divers lost their lives exploring the caves. Efforts to map the cave structure using traditional techniques proved impossible, but with modern 3D scanning and photogrammetry tools, replicas of key works from the c...

The North Sea’s natural conditions, with shallow waters and strong winds, make it ideal for wind farms. But, these same factors pose challenges for construction. To meet ambitious Net Zero targets, improving the speed and efficiency of installing wind farm foundations is critical. At the same time, these works must be carried out safely, without risk to workers on decks. This episode introduces the Engineering Matters Health & Safety Gold Champion, Fugro’s VBM3000, a vertical boring machine, wh...

The first stable atom to form after the Big Bang was hydrogen. Transformed into other atoms through stellar nuclear fusion, it is the foundation of all matter. Bound with other elements in water and hydrocarbons, it is the basis for all life, and the fuel of the industrial revolution. But can it also be the foundation of a new, Net Zero, economy? And what should that new energy system look like? In this episode, we talk to three leading academics about the role of hydrogen in the UK energy tran...

On Coire Glas, in the remote Scottish Highlands, geologists and engineers are developing a vision of Scotland’s energy future. SSE Renewables plans the first pumped hydro storage facility in the UK for decades here, taking advantage of the unique and awe inspiring landscape. But first, they need to understand conditions on and in the ground. And to do that, they needed to trek to the mountaintop, bringing in all the tools they needed by hand or by helicopter. Coire Glas is the largest hydro sto...

For 70% of the world’s population, doing the laundry means hours of difficult manual washing. It was this fact that led Nav Sawhney to leave his job as a design engineer at Dyson and try to come up with a way to fix this problem. After six different design iterations, Nav and his team at the Washing Machine Project had come up with the Divya, a hand crank washing machine that uses no power, 50% less water and a fraction of the time. The machines are built from durable and easy to access materia...

How should local and regional leaders encourage investment in their communities? Around the world, cities struggle with a legacy of industrial decline. In England, devolution of planning policy to mayoral combined authorities has allowed for regions like Greater Manchester to outpace national growth. But within regions, local areas can themselves fall behind, and require a joined up approach to planning and investment. Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, and Susan Hinchcliffe, leader of ...

Project managers have traditionally measured the viability of a project design or materials choice as a triangle, balancing cost, scope and performance. With the addition of carbon, this triangle becomes a three-sided pyramid, with four considerations each interacting with the others. Materials suppliers and project designers now have a wealth of carbon cutting innovations available to them. They can use materials derived from plant sources, replace fossil fuels used in materials processing, an...

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 ove...

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 ...

We can only efficiently reduce those things that we can measure. The Whole Life Carbon Assessment standard, produced by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), established a method for assessing the carbon impact of buildings. Its updated version, which came into effect in July, expanded its scope to include infrastructure, and was designed to be used around the world, not just in the UK. For this comprehensive and global impact on carbon reduction efforts, the Institution was name...

The Engineers Without Borders UK People Design Challenge is a year long challenge that is part of many UK engineering students’ degrees. For this episode we went to Stoller Hall in Manchester to cover the Design Challenge final. The design challenge each year focuses on a new community, and puts them at the centre of the project. For 23/24 the community was Pu Ngaol in Cambodia. Students received video messages and a briefing pack, and then it was up to them to design a solution to improve the ...

With the launch of robot taxis, we are already seeing autonomously controlled devices operating alongside humans in the public realm. As AI improves it will become embedded in our physical environment, in factories and construction sites, and in our streets and homes. In episode 267, we talked to Darren Martin about the importance of considering human needs when developing and deploying technological solutions. In this episode, Darren joins us to work through the implications of new machine lea...

What does it take to win at the Olympics? For Pierre Engel, chief engineer at ArcelorMittal, victory took years of experience, precision, and collaboration. He was aided by kit made entirely of a novel material—low carbon recycled steel. Pierre’s challenge shared much with those faced by Olympians. But he wasn’t skipping rope to keep himself within his weight class—he was shaving kilos from three of the Olympics’ most important symbols, in order to help deliver this years’ games with half the c...

The UK is a global leader when it comes to the development of offshore wind energy. Despite past government bans on onshore wind development, the UK was able to continue developing its wind energy portfolio by going out to sea. The UK now generates over a quarter of its electricity from wind, with a significant portfolio of offshore wind projects amounting to 80+ gigawatts. Despite this success offshore, continuing development is now getting more complicated. With sites selected for development...

When the Queensway Tunnel opened on 18th July 1934 King George V declared it a miracle. At 3.4km long and with a 13.4m internal diameter it was the world’s longest subaqueous tunnel and the largest municipal engineering project that had ever been undertaken in the UK. The project pushed the boundaries of engineering design and construction from its use of advanced grouting techniques to development of a mechanical erector for placing the cast iron segments that lined the tunnel. “I thank all th...

In every home, ancient technologies lurk, threatening fire and ruin. While many devices—lights, TVs, and hard drives, for example—have adopted solid state technologies, power bricks still use ageing electromechanical systems. AmberSemi’s AC Direct DC Enabler is a fabless semiconductor system that replaces these bricks. At home, that means smaller, safer ways of connecting DC devices to AC main power. But the technology could also benefit industrial users and data centres. In factories, low powe...

Can an ancient technology help spin up the renewables revolution? Dumarey—formerly Punch—Flybrid is doing just that, with its flywheel-based technology. In this episode, one of a series this summer, we look at their winning entries to the Engineering Matters Awards. On construction sites, power supply must be shaped around the peak demands of heavy equipment. Waiting times for high power connections typically mean that generators are used instead, and these must be sized for the maximum power d...

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 ...

We delve into the critical role of the built environment in addressing the climate emergency, and how our Engineering Matters Awards Net Zero champion the Built Environment Carbon Database (BECD) is helping decarbonise the industry. Created by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and the Building Cost Information Service (BCIS), the BECD is a comprehensive initiative to collect and share data on carbon emissions from construction projects. With contributions from various professiona...

The concept of intersection has given society a new way to understand identity. It has profound implications for how we understand ourselves and others in our workplaces. For engineers, it can inform how projects are designed, and how they meet the needs of diverse users. The concept was developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, and draws on her analysis of a 1970s discrimination claim brought by Emma DeGraffenreid. DeGraffenreid’s potential employer had successfully defended the claim, by pointing out t...

Around the world, 8% of CO2 emissions come from the production of concrete, and 90% of those emissions come from the production of cement. This episode highlights the groundbreaking work of Engineering Matters Awards Gold Champion Seratech, a company pioneering the use of carbon capture technology in concrete production. Their innovative process uses the abundant mineral olivine to capture CO2 during cement production, resulting in byproducts such as silica and magnesium carbonate. These byprod...

The race to hit Net Zero targets will require an unprecedented surge in innovation. As Dame Laura Sandys, CBE, explains, energy systems will be reshaped, with a few hundred players in the market replaced by millions of actions and assets in a distributed system. These will necessitate not just physical changes to how we generate, use, store and distribute energy, but a new digitalisation that allows for an effective market to function. But this is just one aspect of the complex web of innovatio...

Cone Penetration Testing is a conceptually simple technology first developed in the Netherlands almost a century ago, but is still a critical component in the geotechnical toolkit. Now far more accurate and capable than early cones, modern equivalents are being deployed to solve some of the most pressing challenges, within the Dutch lowlands and far overseas. In recent years a surge in research and development has transformed the traditional cone and equipped it with a range of new capabilities...

For any military operation the objectives of the mission are absolutely paramount. Failure is not an option. The team is motivated to achieve a common goal, often working under extreme pressure, pulling together to overcome challenges, paying attention to detail and always prioritising the objectives of the mission. In this way veterans have a lot to offer construction and infrastructure projects. In this podcast we explore how veterans are using their military skills in new ways from serving t...