Reasons I became an engineer: #1

1 Reply

Photograph of aircraft carrier in heavy seas for decorative purposes onlyThis is the first in a series of posts in which I am going to reflect on my route to becoming an engineer.  These events happened around forty years ago so inevitably my recollections probably have more in common with folklore than reliable history.  Nevertheless, I hope they might be of interest.

I was good at mathematics at school but also geography and when required to specialise at the age of sixteen would have preferred to study mathematics, geography and perhaps economics.  However, my parents and my school, had other ideas and decided that partnering chemistry and physics with mathematics would give me more opportunities in terms of university courses and careers.  Physics was manageable but Chemistry was a complete mystery to me.  I left school shortly before my eighteenth birthday and joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman.  I went to Dartmouth Naval College where, as part of my training to become a seaman officer, I was taught to march, navigate, fight fires, sail yachts, drive motor launches and fly helicopters as well as spending time with the Royal Marines.  After my basic naval training, which included time at sea on HMS Hermes, I went to University sponsored by the Royal Navy with a free choice of subject to study.  So, I chose Mechanical Engineering because I thought as an officer on the bridge of a ship, perhaps eventually in command of a ship, it would be useful to understand what the engineers were talking about when they asked for a change in operations due to technical difficulties.  At that stage in my life, I had no intention of becoming an engineer, but with hindsight it was my first step in that direction.

The Earth is only about 20 years old

Leave a reply

Recently I have been writing a research proposal with two collaborators who live in two different time zones which has made arranging on-line meetings challenging.  There was a brief period last month when the USA had shifted to summer time or daylight saving time a couple of weeks ahead of the UK which made life even more complicated.  Our time zones are based on the sun crossing the local meridian at noon, or in summer moving an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening (a meridian is a great circle joining the celestial poles).  Actually, our whole time system is heliocentric with one day being the period of time between instants when the sun passes over the local meridian and an Earth year being the period of orbit of the Earth around the sun.  A galactic year is the time period the sun takes to orbit the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is 230 million Earth years.  On this basis, the Earth is only about 20 years old, that’s galactic years and based on current estimates of the age of the Earth as 4.5 billion Earth years. In Swahili culture, time has two dimensions, Sasa and Zamini.  Zamini might be measured in galactic years because it refers to the far and immeasurable past whereas Sasa describes the present and recent past.  Sasa is about the period that people can remember so when someone dies they remain in Sasa until the last person who can remember them also dies and then they move to Zamini.  Just as the Western concept of time is experienced differently by individuals [see ‘We inhabit time as fish live in water‘ on July 24th, 2019 and ‘Slowing down to think (about strain energy)‘ on March 8th, 2017], so are Sasa and Zamini since in my perception my paternal grandmother is in Sasa time but for my children, who never met her, she is in Zamini time.

Sources:

Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A world in the making, London: Allen Lane, 2022.

Enuma Okoro, Ways of seeing, ways of knowing, FT Weekend, Saturday 11 March/Sunday 12 March 2023.

Mind-wandering on the hills

Leave a reply

It is the Easter vacation for our undergraduate students and I am taking a week’s leave to wander the hills, digitally detox and return with my consciousness revived by sensory experiences.  So just two sentences and a picture this week though if you want to read more then follow these links: ‘Walking the hills‘ on April 13th, 2022; ‘Digital detox with a deep vacation‘ on August 10th, 2016; and ‘Feed your consciousness with sensory experiences‘ on May 22nd, 2019.The author stood next to a trig point on top of hill

Reliable predictions of non-Newtonian flows of sludge

1 Reply

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I have been working for many years on validation processes for computational models of structures employed in a wide range of sectors, including aerospace engineering [see ‘The blind leading the blind’ on May 27th, 2020] and nuclear energy [see ‘Million to one’ on November 21st, 2018].  Validation is determining the extent to which predictions from a model are representative of behaviour in the real-world [see ‘Model validation’ on September 18th, 2012].  More recently, I have been working on model credibility, which is the willingness of people, besides the modeller, to use the predictions from models in decision-making [see, for example, ‘Credible predictions for regulatory decision-making’ on December 9th, 2020].  I have started to consider the complex world of predictive modelling of fluid flow and I am hoping to start a collaboration with a new colleague on the flow of sludges.  Sludges are more common than you might think but we are interested in modelling the flow of waste, both wastewater (sewage) and nuclear wastes.  We have a PhD studentship available sponsored jointly by the GREEN CDT and the National Nuclear Laboratory.  The project is interdisciplinary in two dimensions because it will combine experiments and simulations as well as uniting ideas from solid mechanics and fluid mechanics.  The integration of concepts and technologies across these boundaries brings a level of adventure to the project which will be countered by building on well-established research in solid mechanics on quantitative comparisons of measurements and predictions and by employing current numerical and experimental work on wastewater sludges.  If you are interested or know someone who might want to join our research then you can find out more here.

Image: Sewage sludge disposal in Germany: Andrea Roskosch / UBA