• Question: Do you spend more time thinking about a project on paper or by tinkering with the model?

    Asked by madalinaf to Amanda, Ben, Dan, Gary, Samer on 19 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Gary Boorman

      Gary Boorman answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Paper, or a PC! Before building anything (which is usually quite expensive and can take a long time), engineers always simulate the project. This means designing something on a PC, and then using computer programs to check it will work as you expect it to. If it doesn’t work on paper, it won’t work in real life!

    • Photo: Ben Drumm

      Ben Drumm answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Mostly on paper/PC, HOWEVER when parts come in you have to assemble and test them, and this can reveal problems with your design which means you have to go back and redesign certain components (this exact thing happened with a beam profile monitor I designed once, we had to redesign the clamps that held some moving cables because they broke during testing :s)

    • Photo: Dan Weatherill

      Dan Weatherill answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      I’m involved in developing the computer programs that other engineers will use to simulate and model our sensors and camera systems.
      But a computer program (or an equation on paper) is useless to engineers unless we know it actually describes the real world. There is ultimately no substitute for experiments in a lot of cases.

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