• Question: If you could solve any engineering problem what would it be?

    Asked by matalan to Andrew, Angela, Eleanor, Emma, Withdrawn on 8 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Andrew Pidgeon

      Andrew Pidgeon answered on 8 Mar 2016:

      I would like to develop a motor that was near enough 100% efficient that we could use in the home, car and in industry.

      The engineering problem is that the energy you put in you get back out in another form and with motors it is usually lost in heat, friction, noise etc. I would have to come up with a clever way or removing all the needless energy losses.

    • Photo: Eleanor Sherwen

      Eleanor Sherwen answered on 8 Mar 2016:

      I would like to be able to solve the problem of how to store lots and lots of energy easily in people’s homes. Or probably I will not solve it, but I hope some engineer or scientist out there will.

      Renewable energy (sun power, wind power) gives us a great way to make enough electricity for what we need. But it’s difficult to store and move. We can use batteries but they can cause pollution or use things which are difficult to mine & make. We need something high in energy like petrol but that doesn’t make CO2 when it burns.

      I have solar panels on my roof and they make more electricity than I use in a year. But I can’t store the power for the winter, I would need a huge battery. Elon Musk is working on it with the Tesla Wall which is really interesting, but even with big big lithium batteries we’d need to have so many!

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