Question: what did you do to win the speak out for engineering prize

Neil Taylor answered on 13 Mar 2015:

Hi 528stfb43!

This competition is an annual event that invites young engineers to speak about a technical topic in a way that is easily understood by non-engineers. You have to speak about your topic for about 20 minutes, and then answer 10 minutes’ worth of judge’s questions!

My talk was about “Lateral Buckling in Subsea Pipelines”. I’ll try to give you an idea of what this is:

The oil/gas that is being transported in a pipeline can be VERY hot (often much hotter than the water in a boiling kettle!) which makes the pipe want to expand. The soil that is on the seabed don’t let the pipe expand as much as it wants, which puts the pipe into “compression” (it squishes it). You can make the same sort of thing happen by pushing at the ends of a plastic ruler. This can cause problems such as “lateral buckling”, where the pipe suddenly moves sideways! You will see this happen to your ruler if you push hard enough.

A funny moment happened while I was presenting : I brought in a piece of fiberboard as a prop to demonstrate what buckling looks like by pushing it in at its ends. Unfortunately, I had practised so much with the prop that it snapped during the actual presentation! This is due to a type of failure known as fatigue – you can see the same thing happen by slightly bending a leg of a paperclip back and forth a number of times – eventually it breaks!

The competition was great fun – I got to listen to the other entrants talk about making Formula 1 “greener”, 3D Printing, and even one on the Rubik’s Cube! The guy who presented the Rubik’s cube presentation gave out a cube to the judges, who were asked to scramble it up. After 30 seconds or so, he came back to collect the cube – and then he solved it while he was presenting! Pretty cool!

If you get the chance to be involved in a similar event in the future, my advice would be to take the opportunity – it’s a lot of fun!

Hope this helps!