What type of engineering do you do? – Tomorrow's Engineers Zone

Question: What type of engineering do you do?
- Keywords:
  engineering
Asked by anon-74500 on 11 May 2020.
- Amber Villegas - Williamson answered on 11 May 2020: last edited 11 May 2020 1:49 pm
  
  I’m a consultant and my job is to look for single points of failure in both power and cooling systems used in Data Centers to stop the internet going down.
  
  I have loads of details in my profile including videos and pictures of various sites I’ve been to.
  
  I also have a handy video to explain what a Data Center is 🙂
- Kimberly Bartlett answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  I do lighting and electrical design, lighting up the outside world to help people move around and live safely and happily.
- Sophie Louth answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  I am a medical engineer which means I make things that doctors use. This could be diagnostic tools, for example MRI scanners. It could be things used for treatment such as new plasters for burns patients. It can also be things that get implanted into a person such as a pace maker.
  I am working on developing new hip replacements, mine are 3D printed and have antibiotics to reduce the chance that someone will get an infection.
- Stephen Jeapes answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  I design electronics. At the moment for video systems but I’ve worked on inkjet printers, health monitors and data-centre systems (I designed the boxes that store large amounts of data on hard-disk drives).
  I end up being involved in all bits of the system though (e.g. mechanical, software)
- Charlene Chung answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  I do water and wastewater engineering. I design sewerage and drainage systems of villages, towns cities, you name it, anywhere that has a drainage system! I also ensure wastewater captured correctly and travels to treatment works accordingly, and no floods nor pollution incidents occur.
- Charles Sparey answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  I started out as an electronics engineer, then I moved into software initially at a programmable logic and firmware level. I then progressively moved up the software stack into middleware and finally application and web services coding. For the last few years, though, I’ve pretty much been working as a lead engineer and project manager and therefore have been responsible for leading and developing project teams rather than with hands on development.
- Ross Hall answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  In my job I design filtration equipment for gas turbines. Our goal is to stop contaminants entering the engine.The main part of my role involves the use of computer aided design software.This allows us to create 3D models and 2D drawings that show the factory workers what they need to build . This is very similar to instructions you get with new furniture , except its for big parts of metal in the middle of the sea.
  
  If your interested in a design career , maybe check out onshape .
  
  https://www.onshape.com/cad-blog/cad-for-students
  
  You can make a free student account that allows you to use their software.They have some good tutorials as well.
  
  Hope this helps .
- Vanessa Stanley answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  I am a Graduate Engineer in Rail Electrification with a focus on Protection and Control. This means that I help design and and find ways to protect the power lines and associated equipment (circuit breakers, relays, etc.) to ensure trains can run safely and clear electrical faults from the line as quickly as possible
- David Linsell answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  As a Marine and Mechanical engineer, most of my engineering has been concerned with the conversion of energy, in the form of fuel, into something useful to my employers. In ships it was propulsion to get the ship from A to B. When working in the Water Industry it was converting biogas made from anaerobic digestion of sewage into electricity. But as well as the direct operation of plant and systems I have also been involved in: designing of new plant and systems, overseeing the construction and maintenance of plant and systems, training and assessing personnel to operate the plant and systems. And always there is the need to explain to a non-technical manager what the capabilities and limitations of the plant are and, in the case of any breakdown, what has gone wrong and how can it be brought back into service.
- Rhys Edwards answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  I’m a Naval Architect by background – A engineer who is responsible ships, submarines and other floating structures all the way through from design to disposal at the end of the working life. My current job is to be the Chief Engineer for the NATO Submarine Rescue System, which is designed to rescue the crew from a sunken submarine worldwide in seas up to 610 meters deep.
- Helen Taylor answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  I’m a Materials Engineer. I make sure that the materials will perform as expected in Nuclear Reactors.
- Graham Hinton answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  Hi Sanya – I’m a Chemical Engineer, and when I was at school and university I used to struggle to understand what chemical engineering was. So, let me try to explain – chemical factories (typically referred to as ‘plants’) are the processes used to convert substances from raw material (like natural gas, or oil etc.) into other valuable products like plastics, fuels and fertilizers. The chemical engineers are the people who look after the chemical reactions and the reactors they take place in, as well as the processes which surround the reactors like heating the substances up, cooling them down or separating different chemicals. In addition, we need to make sure that these processes operate safely and without harming the environment. I hope that this helps, and is of interest to you?
  If you want to know a bit more about chemical engineering, have a look at
  https://www.icheme.org/education/whynotchemeng/
- anon answered on 11 May 2020:
  
  I do structural and mechanical engineering design work. I design temporary structures for motorsport teams globally. We have also taken a pause in that sector and started manufacturing ‘Safe Screens’ for the COVID-19. The typical screens you would over a shop counter, or a freestanding screen to separate 2 different people. We are phasing these out to companies this week, we have some good contracts with gyms that want to purchase them and use them to divide people between the gym equipment. We also do office screens which act as a divider between a desk or a bank of desks for companies which have big offices.
- Rob Husband answered on 12 May 2020: last edited 12 May 2020 7:24 am
  
  I’m a Software Engineer focused on the back-end (the code the runs behind the user interface). My current role is assisting on a large international project fixing defects (bugs) with various subsystems for the Station Management System (SMS) we are developing for a client in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for their new metro system. As port of this role i write code, write automated test code known as unit tests, review other developer’s code and assist the team occasionally with feature work.
  
  I have also worked on UK projects, providing and developing software tools to help manage hardware assets on Crossrail and developing an app for railway construction workers to use to fill out their site diaries that must be completed each shift.
- Frances Askill-Kirk answered on 12 May 2020: last edited 12 May 2020 1:18 pm
  
  I am a product development engineer in the automotive industry. So I am an automotive engineer working on the design and development of automobiles (cars).
  
  A product development engineer takes a component – for example a front door; they then design the front door using 3D software like CATIA V5 and develop it by working in cross functional teams to solve packaging issues, defining product specifications, dimensional variation analysis of the components and ensuring the part can be manufactured and assembled to the vehicle.
  
  You follow your component from the very start to the day it sits in its place on the car!
- Tom Rooney answered on 12 May 2020:
  
  I work in underwater technology. Mainly in underwater positioning (submarine satnav and communication) but also lots of other cool tech… see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8lfIIcfuRs for an example of one of these systems.
- Rohin Titmarsh answered on 12 May 2020:
  
  I’m an engineer in research, so what we look into is things that could be improved or investigated in interesting ways, or things that haven’t been done before! The current project I work on involves coming up with ways to make batteries that go in Electric Vehicles. We have a small pilot line in one of our labs, which means we can try out different assembly methods and different battery designs. We also investigate what can be automated, meaning what steps can be done by robots. This is because it might be a dangerous job so we don’t want people near it, or because a robot would be much faster than a human. One of our robots, called the Cell Loading System (CLS) can test battery cells in groups of 30 to find the good ones, then place those into the battery module for assembly. We make lots of battery modules to make a pack that goes into a car.
- Claire Brockett answered on 13 May 2020:
  
  I’m a medical engineer… I’m also an academic engineer – I work at a university. So I spend my day doing a mixture of research in the laboratory and teaching new engineering students things like biomaterials.
  My research is all focused on the foot and ankle – so at the moment we’re looking at new materials to repair ligaments that are torn during bad sprains, ankle joint replacements for patients with arthritis and also looking at how foot ulcers form in patients with diabetes. I get to meet patients and surgeons, as well as working with industry – it’s a great career!
- Juan Carlos Fallas-Chinchilla answered on 13 May 2020:
  
  I do mechanical engineering and have done materials engineering in the past. In my previous roles we studied materials for hydrogen storage applications (like in cars or buses). Now I work in stress modeling, trying to understand how a component behaves under stress.
- Simon Porter answered on 13 May 2020:
  
  I’m a cost engineer, my job is to tell people how much projects are going to cost. Cost engineering is a fairly straightforward process that involves a number of steps;
  1) Understand what the client has asked for and define the scope of ‘things’ to be costed
  2) Research similar projects in as much depth as possible to find out how relevant they are to the project in question. (This step can take a long time, it heavily depends on the level of confidence required by the client – more robust numbers take longer to produce)
  3) Pull all the data gathered together into a cost model, including profiles of when the costs will be experienced, and use the model to forecast the total cost of the project
  4) Write a report and submit to the customer.
  
  There are a lot of places where you can use your knowledge and experience to influence the outcome. By the end of each project I have a much deeper understanding of whatever I’ve been costing because of all the research into systems and background. I’m a consultant so I get to work on different projects and the diversity is very welcome.
- Matthew Calder answered on 13 May 2020:
  
  I am trained as an Aero-Mechanical Engineer (but that is a very broad term and accounts for lots of different jobs) so more accurately I’m a Systems Design Engineer working on aircraft engines.
  
  At the easiest level an engine can be described in four words: suck, squeeze, bang, blow (there is a nice diagram of what that means here if you are interested: https://www.eng-atoms.msm.cam.ac.uk/why/JetEng). Our job as engineers is to take this concept (these four words) and turn it into something we can go flying on!
  
  Although this concept can be described in four words, the engines that aircraft use to fly are made of up to 25,000 different pieces, so one person trying to wrap their head around every single thing inside the engine would have a really hard time. So what we do is split all these pieces up into smaller systems that are easier to understand, and give these different systems to different teams of engineers to work on.
  
  As a systems design engineer I look at one of these systems (let’s say the electrical system for example) and figure out the best way of designing it and building it to make the entire engine safe, reliable and powerful. This can include how it interacts with all the other systems, what pieces go in to making this system, and the best way to put it all together.
- Iulia Motoc answered on 14 May 2020:
  
  I am an R&D technical consultant and work with clients within the software engineering, system design, telecoms, robotics, and many more.
- Conrad Manning answered on 19 May 2020:
  
  Naval architecture, basically anything that goes on in or under the water. Currently been working on yachts and powerboats with the odd ship and wing, oh and a submarine!
- Jeni Spragg answered on 19 May 2020:
  
  I am a chemical engineer, also sometimes called a process engineer. It looks like Graham has already done a great job of explaining what a chemical engineer is – we design and run the factories (or processes, or plants) that convert materials into products or energy. As our world is built by mass-produced materials, almost anything you can think of will have needed a chemical or process engineer! For example, to make plastics, medicines, vaccines, food, drinks, or electricity.
  More specifically, I look at how we can use big chemical processes to ‘capture’ greenhouse gases produced by power stations and big industrial processes, to help slow down climate change.

Comments

Craig commented on 12 May 2020:

I’m an engineer in the water sector. I ensure drinking water around Scotland is clean and every household has a continuous supply. This includes maintenance on the network while its still live or updating the network for new areas, including new housing estates.
Fidel commented on 20 May 2020:

I’m an Electronic Engineer in the Marine sector. I mainly test and repair electronic units that are used in submarines.