• Question: What is your favourite engineering project you have worked on and how long did it take you to complete?

    Asked by WinonaR on 17 Jul 2021.
    • Photo: Chloe James

      Chloe James answered on 23 Jun 2021: last edited 23 Jun 2021 1:16 pm

      Hi! My favourite project is the one I’m currently working on, which is a big upgrade to the engines on the Type 45 Destroyer warship that I work on. It’s a huge project so last for a very long time. The project will involve dry docking the ship, cutting the ship’s side open and removing two diesel generators. Three more powerful diesel engines will be inserted in place of the old ones.

      There’s more information on that here https://www.navylookout.com/type-45-destroyer-availability-improving/

      As you can imagine, a big project like this takes quite a while, and we will be working on this for some time.

    • Photo: Caroline Roche

      Caroline Roche answered on 23 Jun 2021:

      My favourite project I have worked on was a new build chemical plant. It is one of the largest projects I have worked on with 30 different systems all joined together. At the busiest point we had about 40 engineers all working together on this project, I got to meet lots of different people. We were all assigned to mini teams and got to move around to work on different systems.

      I worked on it for about three years before moving onto another project, it was such a large project that it had been running for seven years already by that time and they had only just started to move systems to the site were the factory was being built.

    • Photo: Jessica Poore

      Jessica Poore answered on 24 Jun 2021:

      This is a really interesting question! So far I would say probably it’s one of the projects from my previous job, which was designing and building hydroelectric (water) turbines, and also doing the commissioning on site – which essentially means doing all the tests that need doing so by the end you can leave it on its own generating clean power!

      Probably my favourite project to remember was in Malaysia, on Borneo. I had to work with our team to design the turbine for the customer in Malaysia (so we had to make sure it worked how they wanted it to, and design things like fibre-optic communications to go with it). They visited us for the testing, so we got to show them around where the factory was (we even had a snowball fight, and they really liked sheep) and then after that, we had to travel to Borneo to do the testing.

      We stayed in a little town on the edge of the jungle, and had to get a boat up a massive river every day to do the testing! The turbine was in a building right in the middle of the jungle, and we sometimes had to avoid snakes, or more often hide our lunch from ants! When we finished work, we were providing power all the way to the town we were staying in, 20km away, and it meant they could use clean power from the turbine rather than burning diesel in local generators. It was pretty hard work at the time, and there were some quite stressful days, but it was such an amazing experience! All in all the project took around 2.5 years – although I definitely wasn’t working continuously on it during that time!

    • Photo: Abigail Seager

      Abigail Seager answered on 25 Jun 2021:

      My favourite project is probably the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. It’s a big event, so I get to work with lots of different people all working on different bits. My job is to get some of the live streams of the sports back to the UK. I’ve been planning it since 2019, and then the olympics got delayed in 2020 because of the pandemic and I had to change my plans and get everything ready for 2021 instead. It’s been a real challenge and I’m really looking forward to finally seeing it up and running in a few weeks time 🙂

    • Photo: Helen Randell

      Helen Randell answered on 30 Jun 2021:

      There are two really! First is the project i used when i applied for my Chartership – it was an energy from waste project and i was responsible for the piling works which took about 6 months to create a ‘new’ ground level 6m below the origional level! And second was my first ever job as a site engineer installing a sodium hypochlorite dosing system at a water treatment works next to the M1 at Nottingham. I still point out my works to everyone if we go past them!

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