Engineering Matters
Five times winner of the Publisher Podcast Awards, including Best Technology Podcast, Engineering Matters celebrates the work of engineers who use ingenuity, practicality, science, theory and determination to build a better world. In the UK alone 5.7million people work in engineering related enterprises from manufacturing and agriculture to construction and transportation. Their work ensures that the country has sustainable power supplies, better connectivity between cities, increasing efficiency in production processes; advanced manufacturing methods; and is embracing the digital transformations that include virtual modelling of our environment, and development of intelligent machines. Our episodes will examine the vital work of engineers using a mix of interviews, analysis and site visits.
Episodes
In the second half of the 20th Century, the world was transformed through infrastructure construction. New roads and railways, levees and power lines, delivered unprecedented comfort and convenience, and laid the foundation for an economy driven by easy transport and trade. But today, as many governments struggle with budgetary constraints and the need to balance...
The post #331 Life Extension for Infrastructure first appeared on ...
Helping the next generation achieve their full potential doesn’t just take commitment from their parents or carers, or from professionals like teachers. It takes, as the saying goes, a village. In Derby, nuclear engineer Katie Jarman has assembled the equivalent of a village full of volunteer maths tutors, all recruited from her employer Rolls-Royce, to...
The post #330 A Village Full of Maths Tutors – Engineering Matters Awards’ w...
Ben Gibbons and his colleagues at Circular11 are developing ways to add value to hard-to-recycle light plastics. They take packaging, and turn it into a lumber-equivalent, suitable for long term use as post and rail fencing. But to maintain tight loops of circularity, they needed to understand the supply chain they were targeting. National Highways...
The post #329 Scaling Low Carbon Innovation – Engineering Matters Awards’ winners...
Worldwide, water is in short supply and high demand, with very real consequences for human health and security. Many countries struggle to maintain aging networks, meaning that more than 20% of clean water is lost before it reaches the customer. New industries, like data centres, are adding to demand, as they use water for cooling....
The post #328 Listening for Leaks – Engineering Matters Awards Innovation Champion, FIDO first app...
On the coast of rural Cumbria, in England’s northeast, a once-secretive nuclear site is transforming its legacy by investing in the engineers of tomorrow. Sellafield, known historically for producing weapons-grade plutonium and nuclear energy, has now begun the 100 year process of decommissioning. At the Sellafield Engineering & Maintenance Centre of Excellence, engineers research and...
The past months have seen a shift in international trade, of a scale not seen for decades. New US tariffs have created uncertainty for investors, and promise to spark a global trade war. While these new challenges to cross-border trade are unique, recent years have seen another shift in industrial policy, particularly in the UK,...
The post #326 Revisited: The Green, Green, Shores of Home first appeared on Engineering Matters.
The rise of AI and machine learning promises a revolution in how we live and work. Expert reasoning and mundane tasks will be completed for us in the cloud. But the cloud is not ethereal or abstract. It is a globe spanning mass of physical infrastructure. Enabling this transformation will demand a huge expansion in...
The post #325 Real world sustainability and the digital revolution first appeared on Engineering Matters.
This February, with the flick of a switch, there was a vast shift of power on Europe’s borders. The Baltic states’ electrical grids, built in the 1960s while these countries were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union, had been under the control of Moscow. In one weekend, the transmission system operators in Latvia, Lithuania, and...
The post #324 A Shift of Power on Europe’s Borders first appeared on Engineering Matters.
Engineers from around the world gathered at the Postal Museum in London for the Engineering Matters Awards 2025, presented in partnership with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, IMechE, and Engineers Without Borders UK, EWB UK. In this episode, we introduce the award gold champions. In episodes to come, we will look in more detail at...
The post #323 Engineers Deliver Impact: The Engineering Matters Awards 2025 first appeared...
Seagrass meadows are the engineers of the marine ecosystem. They provide habitats, support biodiversity, prevent coastal erosion and sequester carbon dioxide. For this reason Italy has embarked upon a world leading project to map these coastal ecosystems at a national scale, enabling it to plan protection and restoration measures that will improve ocean health and...
The post #322 Engineering Ecosystems: Italy’s Seagrass Meadows fi...
We can reuse and retrofit buildings to extend their lifespans, and reduce their embodied carbon impact. But some structures may not be suitable for full reuse: some will have reached the end of their safe life; others will have no viable reuse; and some retrofit projects may require partial dismantling to reduce loadings on the...
The post #321 Circular Construction – Designing for Disassembly first appeared on Engineering Matters.
Quantum mechanics has transformed our understanding of reality, but how did we get here? In this episode, we celebrate the International Year of Quantum, marking 100 years since the birth of this groundbreaking field. From the fierce debates between Einstein and Bohr to the mind-bending implications of superposition and entanglement, we explore how quantum mechanics...
The post #320 International Year of Quantum: 100 Years of Quant...
Britain’s biodiversity has been declining sharply over the last 50 years. The country is now one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world. Despite legislation and efforts to stem the tide of wildlife population decline, little has helped. In February 2025, the UK government announced a new approach to reintroductions of beavers in England....
The post #319 Revisited: Green Engineering, with Bison first appeared on Engineeri...
At a unique hackathon in Manchester, a diverse group of hackers, coders, and gamers gathered to design digital solutions for the nuclear industry, blending innovation, teamwork, and pressure-driven problem-solving. The event, called HackAFuture, served as a groundbreaking careers initiative, offering the winning team not just bragging rights, but jobs with AtkinsRéalis developing their solution. This...
The post #318 Gaming Out a...
When we search for causes of accidents, we often assume a binary: either mechanical failure, or human error, were to blame, and we must pick between them. But labelling an accident as caused by human error doesn’t teach us anything. It makes no effort to understand what caused people to make the decisions they did....
The post #317 Human Factors, Human Error, and Safety by Design first appeared on Engineering Matters.
AI is evolving so fast it eludes definition. The potential impact of the field is barely understood, even by those working in it. ‘Move-fast-and-break-things’ practitioners are deploying AI systems in autonomous vehicles, in courts, in medical diagnosis, and now even at the heart of the US federal government. Few of the constraints that govern individual...
The post #316 What Can AI Engineers Learn From Medical Professionals? firs...
How should engineers think about their duty to design safe structures? For IStructE’s head of climate action Will Arnold, this duty extends beyond the structure, to the safety of everyone on the planet. With renewable energy cutting operational carbon emissions, the majority of the engineering sector’s impact on climate change now comes from embodied carbon....
The post #315 Renewing the World, Without Costing the Planet first appe...
Ten years ago, Fugro set out on an ambitious mission: to bring expert staff off of vessels, and into a purpose built remote operations centre, or ROC. The first of these ROCs, in Houston, now allows specialist staff to work on multiple projects at once, giving customers the real time data and analysis they need...
The post #314 Remote Operations, To the Moon and Back first appeared on Engineering Matters.
The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) has a 100 year history of mapping the world’s oceans. John Nyberg, technical director, explains how the organisation’s role in understanding our oceans is evolving. Now, rather than just recording ocean depths for mariners, the organisation is setting standards for how we record environmental data. In Italy, this approach is...
What do engineers build? Often, the answer will be bridges and dams, apartment blocks and factories. But in everything they do, engineers are also helping to build communities. They are contributing to building people’s careers, and it is those jobs that are central to building a better world. In this episode, the last of four...
The post #312 Lifting Each Other Up — Engineering Matters Awards 2025 shortlist, People first appeared ...
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