• Question: Give me two examples of technical decisions that you had to make on your last job.

    Asked by 116enec32 to Hilly, Lee, Liz, Tadhg, Yasmin on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Yasmin Ali

      Yasmin Ali answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      A job I did a while ago was buying a generator to provide electricity for a gas platform in the middle of the sea (see the picture on my profile!). This generator would power the accommodation for the people that work out there so it gave them power for lights, television, internet, kitchen for cooking, etc.

      I had to make loads of technical decisions for that, for example the size of the generator, as in how much power I wanted it to produce every day. Also the physical size – I had to make sure it fitted in the space available for it.

    • Photo: Tadhg O'Donovan

      Tadhg O'Donovan answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      I am working on a solar concentrator at the moment. This is a large curved mirror that will focus the sun to a point (a very very hot point). The technical decisions I had to make were:
      1) How can be automatically track (i.e. follow) the sun throughout the day
      2) How best can we convert the “hot spot” to usable energy

    • Photo: Lee Margetts

      Lee Margetts answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      That is quite a tricky question in research. I have to look at different strategies for solving a problem and choose which might be the best one to turn into a computer program for a supercomputer. I also have to carefully select typical engineering problems to test the software is working properly.

      Phew! That’s two 🙂

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