Question: How would it affect your work if you had no access to the software you use on a daily basis? How does your work effect the safety of the public and without your work would there be any dangers?

Neil Taylor answered on 9 Mar 2015:

Hi Sophie!

I think that this is a great question! I think that it’s safe to say that, since computers (and software) were invented, engineering has been made a lot more efficient over the years. Before computers, all calculations would need to be performed by hand – which may be suitable for problems that require a few lines of equations, but would be very time consuming for problems that required hundreds, thousands, or even millions of equations!

One thing that computer software such as Microsoft Excel and MATHCAD (a program where you can write in equations like they would appear on paper) allow is for an equation to be programmed in once, and for the equation to be repeated as many times as required for different numbers by using the power of a computer. This makes it many, many times more efficient that doing it by hand!

As well as performing calculations that could be done by hand a lot faster, some computer software gives advantages that are impossible (or pretty unimaginable!) to be had by hand calculations. In particular, finite element analysis (FEA) software not only performs extremely complicated calculations, but also gives a visual image of the problem that you are trying to solve. An example image from FEA of a pipe and connection (called a “flange”) reacting to bending is shown on my profile.

The different colours show how much stress the pipe is under due to the bending that it is experiencing. It would take you a very long time to perform the calculations required to draw this by hand, and a long time colouring the drawing in!

So without the software, things would be less efficient. We could get around this by making our analysis less complicated, but this would require that we make “conservative” (i.e. safe) assumptions. This may lead to designs that aren’t economic enough to go ahead.

In terms of affecting the public and the dangers, I’m going to leave below my answer to a similar question:

If nobody did my work, then we wouldn’t know if the subsea pipelines that carry oil and gas were safe. This would be an extremely dangerous situation to be in, as lives could be at risk – especially those who work offshore on oilrigs.

But fortunately, there are subsea engineers out there… and any work that is done gets checked by other engineers to ensure that it correct.

Hope this helps!