• Question: Describe a specific engineering project that you were responsible for that required a lot of interaction with a variety of people over a long period of time.

    Asked by 116enec32 to Hilly, Lee, Liz, Tadhg, Yasmin on 22 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by nush_xo.
    • Photo: Yasmin Ali

      Yasmin Ali answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      I did a project to buy a diesel generator to generate electricity for an offshore platform… the generator was needed to power the accommodation for the people that work offshore and a few others things. I had to work with the engineers offshore, engineers in my office, engineers in other companies, Health and Safety people, procurement people (they sort out the buying bit)… it took about 8 months!

      I had to work out how big the generator needed to be, how much power we needed it to generate, work out which companies make them, pick a company to buy it from, get it manufactured, go to the factory to see it being tested, then organise to get it sent offshore and installed. It worked when it got there woohoo!!

    • Photo: Tadhg O'Donovan

      Tadhg O'Donovan answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      So I’ve spoken a lot about a solar power plant that I’ve worked on and if you want to know more maybe check out some of my other answers. For this one I think I use the development of an “Oxygen Generator” as an example. This was a big project that brought together a varied group of professionals (Transplant Surgeon, Physiologist, 2 x Mechanical Engineers, Business Development Manager).

      The project started with the need: We needed to keep human organs healthy between harvesting and implanting – this is normally done by putting them on ice, but can damage the organ (9% success rate for liver transplant)

      Solution: Create a device that will circulate warm and oxygenated blood through the organ – theory being that we could even rehabilitate or improve the health of the organ that way and increase the transplant success rate.

      Collaboration – as engineers we might understand the physics of what needs to be done – but the surgeon and physiologist would guide every design decision based on how the device would be used and the consequence for the organ.

      Once we created the device (very recently) we have been working with a Business Development Manager to patent the technology and to find a market for it!

      Long winded answer – sorry -hope you find it interesting 🙂

    • Photo: Lee Margetts

      Lee Margetts answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      My new project, using supercomputers to improve the efficiency of wind farms is a good example. I will have a PhD student working on the project for 4 years from September. He/she will have to visit engineers at Alstom Power in Rugby who are funding the project and building the wind farms. He/she will have 3 PhD supervisors (who are really like mentors), myself (an expert in engineering simulation on supercomputers), an expert in how fluids flow and an expert in wind farm design. We will be supported by a team of experts at the supercomputing centre in Edinburgh (a 100,000 core computer). We’ll also need to talk to mathematicians and computer scientists about new algorithms. The PhD student will also need to read all the publications of all the wind farm engineers, written over the past 20 years. So there’s a huge number of different types of people involved.

Comments