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What is Engineering?

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Engineering turnover in the UK was £1.1 trillion (for the year ending March 2012) which was 24.5% of UK turnover.  So clearly engineering is big and important to the economy of industrialised countries.  But what it is?  That’s a harder question to answer!  In 2013 almost two-thirds of the public could cite the engineering development of the last 50 years that has had the greatest impact on them – that compares with slightly more than one-third in 2010 so more people are beginning to recognise engineering when they see it.  Can you cite the engineering development that has had the greatest impact on you?  If so, post a comment (use the ‘Leave a reply’ box at the bottom of the page).

What is Engineering? As well as being the title of this post it is also a website that attempts to answer the question. You will find the classical answers there and elsewhere, i.e. that engineering is about taking the resources able in nature and converting them into products (e.g. buildings, computers, medical devices and planes) and services (e.g. water, electricity and communications) for society.  Engineers are problem-solvers who communicate and organise the implementation of solution which might be how to create a zero emission car or a carbon-neutral public building.  The best engineers look for elegant solutions so I rather like the no.2 definition that you get when you Google the question, i.e. ‘the action of working artfully to bring something about’.

Source: www.engineeringUK.com

Reading offline

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138-3816_IMGDavid Mikics, writing in the New York Times, reports recent research suggests that reading books is an important aspect of coming to know who we are.  It is a private experience that is best done without distractions, i.e. all of your attention capacity is employed on the book [see my post entitled ‘Silence is golden‘ on January 14th, 2014 for more on attention capacity].  Our brains can achieve a much deeper level of thought and engagement when they are focussed on a single task without distractions.  This just does not happen when reading on-line because there are too many distractions.  Some research has shown that office-workers are distracted every three minutes and that it takes about 20 minutes to achieve a high level of engagement in a task.  So it is easy to see the attraction for bosses of replacing white-collar workers by smart machines [see my post entitled ‘Smart Machines‘ on February 26th, 2014].

But David Mikics suggests that reading a novel is important for deeper reasons associated with learning lessons about humanity that are not available elsewhere.  Novels take us on a journey with another self and allow us to look into people’s inner lives.  None of this can be achieved reading short blogs or watching short videos on-line and is perhaps why reading a good novel on holiday is such a cathartic and popular activity.

But don’t stop reading my blog instead click the ‘follow’ button if you have not already and then you can be distracted every Wednesday!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/a-focus-on-distraction.html

Rhapsody in Blue

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118-1841_IMGLast Saturday we went to a fantastic concert at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall.  It featured the pianist Michel Camilo playing the UK premier of one of his own compositions, Piano Concert No. 2 ‘Tenerife’ and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.  He was fabulous – there are a couple clips on YouTube of him playing Rhapsody in Blue so you can some idea of what we experienced on Saturday evening.  I cannot play the piano and so his virtuosity was all the more impressive to me.  The applause at the end was ecstatic and followed by an even more spectacular encore, Caribe.

As we applauded for what seemed like a couple of minutes, I was reminded of an example that I had worked through in class last term for my first year undergraduate course in Thermodynamics.  The worked example is attached and involves estimating the temperature rise in palms of your hands as a consequence of vigorously clapping during which kinetic energy is converted into internal energy in the flesh of your palms and causes the temperature rise, ignoring the energy converted into sound.  The emphasis was on estimating by creating a model using a set of identified assumptions and, once we had an answer, I discussed the influence of those assumptions and introduced the idea of sensitivity analysis – this is not included in the worked example attached.

For twenty enthusiastic claps we found a temperature rise of a quarter of a degree Celsius, which we would probably notice since the hairless skin on the palm at the base of thumb is sensitive to changes as small as a twentieth of a degree, according to Dr Lynette Jones of MIT [doi:10.4249/scholarpedia.7955].

Clean fossil fuel?

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The amount of energy stored in methane hydrate could be twice that of all other fossil fuel reserves based on data from the US Geological Survey, the New Scientist reported on 31st August, 2013 in an article entitled ‘Buried Treasure’.  At this point, most of you are probably wondering what methane hydrate is and where it is stored.  Microbes on the seabed eating organic matter produce methane molecules that at high pressure and low temperature combine with the water to form a hydrate, which is white crystal.  Large deposits of methane hydrate deposits are believed to lie along continental margins, mostly in ocean sediments.

Natural gas and shale gas (‘Fracking’ on August 28th, 2013) are also methane, which releases less carbon dioxide when it is burned than coal or gas and hence is regarded as cleaner.  However, methane hydrate deposits might have an additional advantage because some research has shown that the methane molecule trapped in the hydrate crystal can be replaced by a carbon dioxide one.  So we might be able to extract methane and simultaneously store carbon dioxide.  Sounds too good to be true and the second law of thermodynamics will ensure that there is a price to be paid somewhere and somehow (see post entitled ‘Sonic Screwdriver’ on April 17th, 2013 for more the 2nd law).

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929320.800-frozen-fuel-the-giant-methane-bonanza.html

https://www.llnl.gov/str/Durham.html

http://www.jogmec.go.jp/english/oil/technology_015.html?recommend=1