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Asked by Ebonnie to Ashwanth, Jeni, Mark, Natalie, Stephen on 14 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by Amity.
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Mark Gowan answered on 14 Jun 2016:
That’s a difficult question to answer because sometimes what somebody thinks as an unsolvable problem, another person looks at it and says try this and it works.
For me it has to be a method for installing compensation grout tubes which were used to support the ground beneath buildings in London whilst the tunnelling for the New Crossrail project were being excavated. I was speaking to a company who undertake this type of work worldwide and they were telling me how they struggled to gain accuracy in positioning these tubes and that they had to do lots of calculations after they had installed. I said that’s not a problem, we can modify a small piece of tunnelling equipment and that will give millimetre accuracy. They were very pleased and that’s how they now do it.
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Jeni Spragg answered on 15 Jun 2016:
This is a good question, because something engineers have to do when solving problems is to figure out when to use all the detail and take things back to the fundamentals, and when it’s okay to make things simpler in order to get a useful answer.
Fortunately, when a problem is very complicated, an engineer can often simplify it by making a lot of assumptions, or using a correlation that someone else has come up with.
For example, when I was completing my design project in my final year of university, I was designing a separator that would take carbon dioxide out of biogas (the methane from rotting waste). It seemed impossible to me, as it was a very complicated process that involved all sort of chemical reactions, and fluid mechanics and heat transfer. I couldn’t find the data I needed anywhere! In the end I found the assumptions and equations I needed that enabled me to design it. Sometimes, as long as it does the job it is designed to do, it doesn’t matter if you have completely solved the problem!
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Natalie Wride answered on 15 Jun 2016:
Hi Ebonnie 🙂
This is a great question! Like Mark said people look at problems in different ways – it’s one of the great reasons why Engineers all work as part of a team because everyone always has different ideas 🙂 Often, I find there might not be an answer which solves the whole problem – quite often we solve small parts of the puzzle and gradually they all come together.
One of the projects I worked on involved strengthening the ground beneath a bridge so that a road could be put there. One of the problems everyone in my team had when suggesting solutions was getting the machinery under the bridge because it was too tall! We ended up using a specialist engineering company who had machines who could fit under the bridge – they looked like something out of transformers! But it was something we hadn’t even thought of!!
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Stephen Richardson answered on 15 Jun 2016:
Wow, some great engineering ingenuity from Mark, Jeni and Natalie!
I worked on a project where we were trying to solve a problem for kids having treatment because their bones are too short. It sounds extreme but the doctors break their bones and then stretch them apart – the amazing thing is that the body then fills the gap with new bone and hey-presto; the bones have been made longer.
But during the treatment the kids aren’t supposed to bend their knees (or elbows if it’s their arms).
The doctors had real problems trying to make a brace that would stop the legs from bending and it was costing them a lot of money too because each one was made specially to fit the patient and then had to be thrown away after.
I came up with a design that used cheaper materials and it could be adjusted to fit different patients using special clips a bit like you get on ski boots.
So not really environmental but still – it was a good solution.
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