• Question: what is the hardest thing you done as an an engineer

    Asked by Dragonflames08 to Oliver, Lesley, Leah, Hannah, Graeme, Aleks on 1 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Graeme Burt

      Graeme Burt answered on 1 Mar 2019:

      Its probably the development of the “crab” cavities for LHC. I started working on it in 2007 and it won’t be completed for another 4 years. These “crabs” rotate the beam into collision in the LHC using huge electric and magnetic fields, but the problem is the only one ever developed doesn’t fit in between the two beams and we don’t want to redig and reconstruct a 27 km accelerator so we needed to make it twice as small. It operates at 3 million volts continuously so we need to use special superconducting materials to stop it overheating which only work at -269 degrees Celcius and a speck of dust would stop them operating. We have had around 30 engineers working on it for 12 years. We tested the first prototype last year and thankfully it worked as expected, so now we have to make 16 of them and install them in the tunnel.

    • Photo: Leah Morgan

      Leah Morgan answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      The hardest things I’ve ever done is probably the degree that got me here! I found university so challenging (even with all the parties!) but luckily everyone on my course was so friendly, including a lot of the lecturers. So I never struggled alone 🙂

    • Photo: Lesley Colquhoun

      Lesley Colquhoun answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      My hardest challenge was trying to catch up with a delay in the project. I was working in Norway in the final stages of the project and just nothing was going right! every day there was new problems and as soon as you solved one another cropped up! We got there in the end but it was a battle!

      The relief at the end to see it all working was worth it though 🙂

    • Photo: Hannah Griffin

      Hannah Griffin answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      Keeping up-to-date with the latest technologies. IT changes so fast. There are always new languages, new tools, new ways of designing user experiences, new hardware, new recommended ways of building software… Although this is hard and at first daunting, it is also the thing that makes software engineering such an exciting area to work in. There is always something new to learn.

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