Engineering Matters

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#73 How to Build a Digital Twin Oct 08, 2020

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Anglian Water currently enjoys a daily surplus of 150 million litres of water, but this is forecast to become a 150 million litre deficit by 2045. To help mitigate this shortfall it is constructing hundreds of kilometres of large diameter pipeline, as well as pumping stations and storage points to divert water from areas with...

#72 Seeing the Himalayas: Kickstarting Net Zero Oct 01, 2020

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On a bright morning in April, people in the city of Jalandhar in the state of Punjab stood out in the streets and saw something breath-taking… something that many of them had never seen before. The skies were so clear that for the first time in decades the soaring peaks of the Himalayas standing almost...

#71 Stewards of the Soil Sep 24, 2020

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Historically civilisations have sprung up wherever the land was most fertile, soils that supported good crop productivity to meet the food requirements of highly concentrated groups of people. Now with the global population close to 8 billion, and all arable land already committed to food production, we are turning to technology to help fertilise soils...

#70 On Track for a Rail Revolution Sep 17, 2020

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The railway network in the UK is old and vast and home to the first public railway to use steam locomotives in the world. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened in 1825 and connected coal mines in the northeast of England. It was the metal track, the coal-fired furnace, and the shrill whistle of the...

#69 Artificial Intelligence in Infrastructure Sep 10, 2020

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Maintaining a tunnel requires many hours of dedicated work by highly skilled engineers. And as our network of tunnels expands, so does the maintenance demand. Asset owners and local authorities have been under pressure for years to find a cost-effective way of monitoring and maintaining their underground infrastructure. And now, engineers in Switzerland have turned...

#68 The Future of Design Sep 03, 2020

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Changes to the way we do design are coming; construction is languishing at the bottom of the productivity rankings, now below hunting and fishing. Decision-making is happening late in the project lifecycle, meaning that design work has to be repeated unnecessarily, and a reward culture based on price rather than outcomes builds in more inefficiency....

#67 The Future is Remote and Autonomous Aug 27, 2020

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Remotely operated vehicles, uncrewed surface vessels and ever-increasing autonomy are removing personnel from dangerous work offshore in the North Sea and elsewhere. Inspection of maritime assets is now being controlled from onshore operations centres. We look at one of these command and control centres, the Fugro facility in Aberdeen. With a robust regulatory framework and...

#66 Fever Screening in Airports Aug 20, 2020

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As a small island trading nation, Britain risks killing its economy and losing millions of jobs, unless it can allow people to get back to work in as normal a way as possible. So said John Holland-Kaye, CEO of Heathrow Airport, who wants to see a more sophisticated way of opening our borders. He was...

#65 Every Little Helps Aug 13, 2020

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At the start of the Covid-19 lockdown, one of the few reasons people were allowed to leave their homes was to shop for the basic essentials. Social distancing rules meant that shoppers were held in long queues that wound through supermarket car parks, moving slowly. One supermarket in northern England had the added problem of...

#64 EDAROTH Aug 06, 2020

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Manchester – the city has been on the cutting edge since the birth of the industrial revolution. From John Dalton’s Atomic Theory in 1803, to the invention of Graphene in 2004. More recently it has given the world the greatest music ever made. Home to 2.8 million people in 1.2 million dwellings over 500 square...

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