• Question: How do mechanics come up with the ideas and how can they transport things from one place to another costing them the minimum?

    Asked by Devina 11 to Pete, Olivia, Lauren, Joe, Fe on 6 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Joseph Chilcott

      Joseph Chilcott answered on 6 Mar 2015:

      Hi Devina,
      I am not a mechanic however, with any of the engineering disciplines ideas are normally driven by a problem that we are trying to solve. Normally in Engineering we are presented with a problem and then conduct research within the relevant area. For example, if I were asked to create wings for an aeroplane, I would research about wings and the laws of physics that enable them to carry a plane in the air.

      However, sometimes ideas come from imagination. For example, one day someone once thought ‘what if cars could drive themselves’, and guess what we are now starting to see cars that can drive themselves.

      Deciding how to transport goods from one place to another is dependent on what goods we are transporting. One rule which I think would always apply is, the more items you transport in one go the cheaper it is per item. (I can explain this further if you want me to- let me know).

      Thanks for your question.
      Joe

    • Photo: Felicity Harer

      Felicity Harer answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Hi Devina,
      We mostly look at what’s out there and come up with new ways of combining them or making them do new things. For instance, I think superglue was originally meant to be used in medicine! That and loads of chatting to people who know more about things than yourself and brainstorming work wonders. People tend to come up with better ideas when they bounce them off each other!
      Transport-wise, it depends entirely on what you’re transporting where. Generally the slower it goes the cheaper…

    • Photo: Peter Roskilly

      Peter Roskilly answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Transport is always more complicated than anyone expects, because of this a lot of time and money is spent on planning transportation.
      Particularly if your transporting something huge.

      A great example is Wind turbine blades. They’re massive.
      When people are planning and designing Wind farms they have to considerer how to get their turbines to the site, because they can’t make them there.
      To do this they have to ship from the fabricators to a large enough dock, then drive them up to site on looooong trucks.
      In preparation sometimes wind farm clients will have to pay to upgrade the route from the docks to the site to make sure the heavy parts don’t break anything. This involves fixing bridges, widening roundabouts and moving signs.

      Not sure what your schools policy on YouTube is, but here is a video from Siemens that illustrates transport issues quite nicely in a video of them transporting a huge blade:

    • Photo: Olivia Stodieck

      Olivia Stodieck answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      Hi Devina,
      I’m not a mechanic either, but as engineers we often have to design ways of transporting things fast, reliably and at minimum cost. There are actually formulas for aircraft design, which allow you to do a trade-off between these different criteria (one really important one is the Breguet Range Equation, which basically tells you that if you want to fly far, you need a light aircraft structure, very little drag and efficient engines). So by knowing the basic rules of physics and understanding what we need to transport, how fast and where, we can come up with the best designs. A bit of imagination and creativity is also helpful 🙂
      Just for fun, this is a video of the Super Guppy – an iconic Airbus transport Aircraft – you can fit a lot in there (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53X4HKzifvI)

Comments