Shows / Engineering Matters
Engineering Matters
Five times winner of the Publisher Podcast Awards, including Best Technology Podcast, Engineering Matters celebrates the work of engineers who use ingenuity, practicality, science, theory and determination to build a better world. In the UK alone 5.7million people work in engineering related enterprises from manufacturing and agriculture to construction and transportation. Their work ensures that the country has sustainable power supplies, better connectivity between cities, increasing…
Episodes
- Engineering Matters
#180 Mining in a Net Zero World
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 vehicles and…
- Engineering Matters
#179 Trees: Escaping the Heat
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 with the…
Engineering Matters#178 A Vision for a Modular Antarctica
Antarctica New Zealand runs a critical research hub on the volcanic Ross Island. Originally built in 1957, it consists of 12 buildings connected by walkways –…
- Engineering Matters
SHORT: Tunnelling on Target
An era of tunnelling megaprojects has dawned as governments have invested in the underground the world over. Skills shortages are nothing new to the…
- Engineering Matters
#177 The Abandoned Mine Lands of Wyoming
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 United…
- Engineering Matters
#176 Bangalore and the Digital Transformation
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. In its…
- Engineering Matters
#175 Tarmac on the Future of Road Technology
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 new…
- Engineering Matters
#174 Closing the Building Performance Gap
Buildings can use around three times as much energy as design models anticipate. This is an incredible figure and becomes a real problem when considered in…
- Engineering Matters
#173 Europe’s First Energy Island
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 site…
- Engineering Matters
#172 Vaccibox: Revolutionising Kenya’s Vaccine Storage
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 areas with…
- Engineering Matters
#171 Ultraviolet light: Preventing the Next Pandemic
For most environments, disinfection has barely changed since the 1918 influenza outbreak; many of the same companies offer similar chemical products with which…
- Engineering Matters
#170 Pet Food vs Climate Change
Although ‘pet food’ and ‘engineering’ may not immediately align in the mind, one supplier wanted to ensure its products were both sustainable and ethical; from…
- Engineering Matters
#169 Ocean Science: Ten Years to Turn the Tide
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. For much of…
- Engineering Matters
SHORT: Making the Big Decisions
Supply chain disruptions that initially left companies entirely without critical materials have given way to inflation of shipping and production costs…
- Engineering Matters
#168 Industry 4.0: Finding the Hidden Factory
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 production capability…
- Engineering Matters
#167 Building Allyship
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 people’s…
- Engineering Matters
#166 Space: The Robotic Age
As access to space has become less expensive, companies are moving to create an in-orbit servicing and manufacturing industry. In-orbit servicing, repairing…
- Engineering Matters
#165 A Road Map to Net Zero Highways
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 their…
- Engineering Matters
#164 Under the North Sea: Threat and Promise
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 North Sea was a…
- Engineering Matters
SHORT: Engineering Winners
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 our world and…
- Engineering Matters
#163 Nuclear Decommissioning with Data
Our world is becoming increasingly more virtual, promising new ways of relating to each other and of doing business. The benefits of this, however, are…
- Engineering Matters
#162 Smooth as Glass: The Road Ahead
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 damage to…
- Engineering Matters
#161 The Net Zero Laboratory
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 scientists study…
- Engineering Matters
#160 Autonomous Driving: Solving the Lidar Challenge
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 when he…
- Engineering Matters
#159 Dealing with Data
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…
- Engineering Matters
#158 Vertical Farming at Potager Farm
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 around…
- Engineering Matters
SHORT: Celebrating the Work
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 talented young…
- Engineering Matters
#157 Interconnectors: The Green Link to Ireland
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 what…
Engineering Matters#156 Social Value: How to get it Right
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 is how they…
- Engineering Matters
#155 Coral and the Hunt for a Cure
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 that inhabit…
- Engineering Matters
#154 Falkirk Wheel: The Design Story
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 lift ever…
- Engineering Matters
SHORT: Engineering Waste
In partnership with Tabsal SCL, Engineering Matters speaks with Javier Saldise about how his Spanish company is taking waste wood and transforming it into…
- Engineering Matters
#153 Recycling Carbon: Biofuels from Waste
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 developments in…
- Engineering Matters
#152 Crisis Shelter Revisited
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 people is at…
- Engineering Matters
#151 Electrification: the future of industry
In this week’s episode we will learn about the technologies that have driven the development of electrification for a variety of well-known industrial OEM…
- Engineering Matters
#150 Green Hydrogen: Creating the System
Green hydrogen, created from renewable energy resources, has been hailed as a panacea to decarbonisation of heat and fluctuation in natural gas prices. But the…
- Engineering Matters
#149 Roads: Invention needs Ambition
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 transport today…
- Engineering Matters
#148 Skyscrapers: Predicting the Future
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 mystics…
- Engineering Matters
#147 Flooding: Making Space for Water
In the summer of 2021 record rainfall overwhelmed river systems across Europe. People in the Limburg region of the Netherlands held their collective breath as…
- Engineering Matters
#146 Small Modular Reactors
The 2021 energy crisis saw coal power plants fire into life as natural gas prices spiralled and wind turbines stood idle. The combination of circumstances…
- Engineering Matters
#145 Andrew Smyth – Engineering with Cake
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 combined…
- Engineering Matters
#144 Enhancing an Estuary, Restoring a River
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…
- Engineering Matters
#143 Learning From Adventure
This week we bring you a guest episode from the Planet Beyond podcast. An adventurous spirit in people has made many successful organisations what they are…
- Engineering Matters
#142 Blue Carbon: The Forgotten Store
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 spaces…
- Engineering Matters
#141 Setting up a Vaccine Factory
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 leading…
- Engineering Matters
#140 HS2 and the Golden Thread of Station Design
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 London in the…
- Engineering Matters
#139 Offshore Wind: Scotland’s World Leader
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 twice over…
- Engineering Matters
#138 Space Resources: The Next Leap
Ever since the beginning of the space age, scientists and engineers have considered the role extra-terrestrial resources could have to supporting missions of…
- Engineering Matters
#137 The Calculator that Could Still Save the World
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 world to…
- Engineering Matters
#136 The Future of Mobility
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 lockdowns…
- Engineering Matters
#135 COP26: Decarbonising Transport
Decarbonisation of transportation and shipping will require us to leverage improvements to green technologies and adapt to new ways of thinking and organising…
- Engineering Matters
#134 COP26: Working in a Climate Conscious World
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 has a…
- Engineering Matters
#133 COP26: The Legacy of the Lac Megantic Disaster
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…
- Engineering Matters
#132 COP26: Decarbonising Buildings
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…
- Engineering Matters
#131 Cranes: How to Plan a Lift
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…
- Engineering Matters
#130 Navigating New Construction Technology
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…
- Engineering Matters
#129 A Vision for Clean Growth in Bradford
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…
- Engineering Matters
#128 Positioning Satellites in New Space
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…
- Engineering Matters
#127 Tools for Thinking
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…
- Engineering Matters
#126 Propping up Vienna
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…