Higher Options 2014 - 17th, 18th, 19th September

Introduction to Engineering

Slide 1: Header slide

Slide 2: Engineers Ireland TV Advert

Slide 3:

Good Morning,

My name is Damien Owens and I am a Chartered Engineer. I work with Engineers

Ireland as Membership Director and Registrar. You may have heard of Engineers

Ireland either through our TV advert or our STEPS website and coordinators.

Incidentally, all of the people in the TV ad are working engineers in many different

and exciting areas.

When I was asked to speak here today I tried to understand what was required –

Options = decisions – so what information do you need to inform you about a career

in engineering?

The engineering profession and field of engineering are full of many exciting

opportunities – after all anything that you see around you every day was designed

and made by engineers. Engineering drives the economy – directly (by making

goods) and indirectly (by making machines that help us produce such as tractors).

Today I will provide:

An overview of my experiences as a student and engineer

How engineering courses at colleges are designed to enable you take an

active role in engineering, even while you are studying at college

We will then look at some of the future trends which will become your reality

when you graduate

So let’s begin…

Slide 4

So what attracted me to engineering? My Dad was a big influence – he was a

fisherman and when you are at sea in a boat there is no one to help if there is a

problem. If the engine breaks - you fix it; if the lights break – you fix them; if the

radio or clock breaks you fix it. So my Dad was always fixing things about the house

and I guess I got the bug.

After my leaving certificate I went to study engineering. I wasn’t sure exactly what

type of engineering I would like so I chose a course that had common years at the

start – that way I could experience a number of areas before specialising – and I

eventually chose electronics.

Slide 5 – Pipes

When I was at college I got a summer job in an engineering design office. On my

first day a guy came in from the workshop and gave me some bent pipes and asked

me to draw them.

So I drew then on my paper drawing board (no computer drawings then!) When the

drawings were finished they went to the workshop and they tried to make another

pipe and if it did not fit into the assembly then the drawing was modified and the

process continued until it was correct.

I asked what the pipe was for and was told “it’s the exhaust pipe from an Ariane

rocket”!

Slide 6 Crash Tender

The next project I undertook was much simpler – drawing a bracket to hold the

steering wheel on an airport fire crash tender. The FCT was designed for airport use

– so it had fast acceleration to get down the runway to an incident as fast as

possible. It carried about 6 tons of water and foam to put out fires.

One day I heard a huge roar of laugh from the design office – one of the team had

designed the water tank to be made of strong light aluminium. When the engineer

did the calculations they revealed that when the FCT stopped suddenly the water

movement would cause the tanks to stretch the tanks by 30cm and burst. This

showed the importance of checking the calculations before making anything!

Slide 7 – Rocket Launch

Sometime later I was watching the evening news and it showed a launch of an

Ariane rocket …which did not go as planned and the rocket crashed into the sea. As

far as I could see the exhaust was OK so it wasn’t my fault! But that bit of reflection

served to teach me that every component in a system has to work properly for the

entire system to work – never underestimate the importance of the work you do. It

has a purpose.

Slide 8, 9, 10 – Mainframe Computer

When I graduated I worked as a test engineer on mainframe computers. These were

large and complex machines - 2M high and 5M long with hundreds of printed circuit

boards and thousands of chips connected my lots of cables and wires – many the

thickness of a human hair. They consumed a huge amount of power and they gave

of more heat than the central heating system in your home. The engineering

challenge was actually keeping the computers cool – some computers were actually

cooled by cold water radiators! Now imagine the engineering challenge of cool water

pipes in machines with a lot of high voltage electric cables!

Each of these computers took 8 weeks to test fully - and that could be 24 hour days!

Slide 11 – Then and now

Those computers cost about $1.5m - nowadays you can get a Raspberry Pi

development kit with the same performance for about $100. If the rest of the world

did the same you could buy a family car for €2 and a house in Dublin for €20. So the

cost for performance has really fallen!

Slide 12 – Fax Machine

From there I went to work as a Development Engineer with a phone company. One

of the first projects I worked on was evaluating the performance of fax machines –

this was then a new technology from Asia where they were developed for

transmitting scanned copies of documents. They were popular because they were

relatively fast and could scan the complex characters of Japanese and Chinese

which was not really possible with computer keyboards at that time. Many

companies set up fax services but they were short lived – overtaken by the

introduction of PCs.

Slide 13 – Minitel

I then was involved in research work on computer character sets – IA5 – which were

being standardised to allow computers talk to each other. Back there was no single

system for computers to talk to each other so a service called Videotex was

developed which allowed this to happen more easily.

In France the telephone company realised that when they printed telephone

directories about 10% of the telephone numbers were already out of date… so they

gave out these terminals called Minitel so people could get phone numbers online.

They were slow, with very basic graphics but ultimately the standardised model

became the source of the Internet as we know it.

As part of this research work I was awarded a Master’s degree in engineering.

Slide 14 – Alarm panel

My next project was particularly interesting – it was the first time I worked on a

consumer product – which is very different that working on products for business.

We had formed a joint venture with a US company which had developed a security

alarm panel. The panel was really advanced - it could speak, switch on lights when

you were out to give the impression to burglars that there was someone in the

house! It was designed by a company called IDEO – they also designed the Apple

iMac computers.

My job was to get the panel modified to work in Ireland (standards were different

from US) and I spent time with the US developers. What was really interesting is that

I had to work with very different non-engineering people – psychologists who

influenced how the product was used by the user; marketers.

When we were ready to launch the service in Ireland I was sent to the US to do final

testing on the product – unfortunately the manufacturing wasn’t quite right and I had

to make the difficult decision to delay the product launch - even though 50 people

back in Ireland had been recruited to run the business. When there is security and

safety at stake there can be no other option.

Slide 15& 16 Call Center/Data Center

I then worked on developing telecoms services for international companies setting

up call centers in Ireland. A call center is basically a factory with lots of people

making phone calls – processing orders, claims etc. A key requirement is reliable

communications – after all if the phone service fails you have hundreds of workers

with nothing to do not to mention the loss of revenue and reputation.

I spent a lot of time working overseas helping the IDA attract call centers to Ireland

against fierce competition from other countries. There are about 40,000 people

working in call centers in Ireland today. Call centers then became contact centers

(processed emails) and this along with the Internet revolution drove the requirements

for Datacenters which store vast amounts of data and require ultra-reliable

telecommunications and electricity.

So to summarise my first ten years after college:

I started in electronics

Moved into computing and telecoms

Most of the services I worked on were replaced within 5 years

And I went from creating things to services to jobs

Much of what I did involve much complexity and working with teams from

many cultures and countries

So – how did my engineering education prepare me for all of this?

Let’s look a bit more closely at what engineers do!

Slide 17 Hoover

Herbert Hoover was an engineer and US president. He gave his name to the

visionary Hoover dam located on the border of Arizona and Nevada. This was an

immense project

The base is 200M thick – cooling the concrete was a challenge

The Colorado river had to be diverted

The reservoir, Lake Mead, is so large that the water could put Ireland under

half a meter of water

The construction caused 600 earthquakes!

The weight of the dam and water is so heavy that the earth’s crust has been

depressed about 20cm

There were 112 deaths associated with the construction of the dam.[70] The

first was J. G. Tierney, a surveyor who drowned on December 20, 1922, while

looking for an ideal spot for the dam. His son, Patrick W. Tierney, was the last

man to die working on the dam, 13 years to the day later

Slide 18/19/20 Types of engineering

So we can see the many types of engineering - the fields of engineering are

constantly evolving.

Traditional (Civil, Mechanical)

Technical engineering (ICT etc.)

Future engineering (biomedical, environmental)

So for a few minutes let’s think and act like an engineer…

Slide 21 – How do Engineers think?

Here we see the different thinking levels of being an engineer –

the core mind : making things work

engineering habits of mind – problem solving, adapting

learning habits of mind - how we learn

As you can see engineers get to work everywhere – in fact the first two men to walk

on the moon were engineers!

Slide 22/23 Think outside the box

You may have seen this puzzle – how can you join these 9 dots with 4 lines? By

thinking outside the box.

Slide 24

So let’s look at a problem – this is the Lockheed SR72 – Blackbird aircraft. This is

the fastest aircraft ever built and has flown at 3500km/h – almost three times the

speed of sound. Anyone here from Cork? – Well this plane will get you home from

Dublin in less than 5 minutes.

It is black to reflect radar however when it flies it heats up due to friction. When the

aircraft is at rest the panels have big gaps, and leak fuel, but when it flies the panels

expand with the heat and seal the gaps!

So, our challenge is to build an ejector seat to get the pilot out!

Slide 25 key components

It looks simple but we need more than this…..

Slide 26/27

Have you ever put your arm out of the car window when it is moving fast? Now

imagine your entire body doing that out of an aircraft at a few hundred km/h!

Decision to Activate – the handle weighs 20KG at zero G, 80Kg @ 4g

Open the canopy – make space for the pilot!

Make Person Safe – strap legs to chair, cover face

Biological Factors – the pilot is sitting on top of a controlled explosion -

explode the charge too fast = broken spine; too slow = hit by aircraft tail. Do

you know of any other controlled explosions? Car airbag

Orientation of the aircraft – aircraft may be upside down

Where will you land? – land or water

Zero-Zero – you may eject on the ground

This is the finished seat, with gyro, inflatable boat etc.

Slide 28 – pilot eject video

This all happens in 0.1 seconds

Slide 29/30 Tarantula / maths

Recognise this? It’s a tarantula – and its bite does not kill you. It just has that

reputation!

Similarly with maths, it has a reputation for being difficult – but here is a secret there

are only two mathematical operations

Addition and Division - all others are a combination of these two! And all you will

ever add/divide are numbers and letters so it really cannot be that difficult!

So don’t be scared – and in college you only do the maths you will require for

engineering. Don’t forget that maths is only one of the tools engineers use to design

things.

Now I will let you in on another secret….

There are 21 engineering colleges in Ireland and thousands of colleges in Europe…

and they all use the SAME books. So what makes the difference – YOU DO!

Slide 31 education

• CDIO - Conceive Design Implement Operate is an educational framework

that underpins most engineering courses. It demonstrates the lifecycle of all

that engineers must consider from design to operation for the design life,

The second element is accreditation – this ensures that the skills and knowledge you

acquire at college will prepare you for the workplace. Engineers Ireland accredits

engineering courses in Ireland and there is a list of these courses on the STEPS.ie

web site

Slide 32 Accreditation criteria

This is a list of the main areas that you will learn in college – you will actually learn

this because during accreditation we talk to students and employers, look at project

work – so we know that this is actually the knowledge you will learn.

The top 3 are concerned with engineering knowledge and problem solving

The bottom 3 are concerned with how you impart this knowledge with other people,

in different settings in an ethically and socially acceptable manner

Slide 33

So what will college be like?

Common early year(s) – this will allow you time to try different disciplines

Problem Based Learning - a lot of what you learn will be by doing

(labs/projects)

Teamwork and interaction – a lot of team based activity

Work placements – most colleges provide work placements in 3rd year, this

means that when you graduate you will be ready for work

Supported Independent learning – studying is up to you (you are an adult) but

if you get stuck there is a lot of support.

Slide 34 – Limerick Castle video

Slide 35 – What will the future look like? – Remember to think outside the box!

Slide 36 Cybersecurity

A lot of effort will be expended to keep data secure (from hackers, prying eyes etc.)

and safe e.g. some critical information from the early days of computing has been

lost e.g. NASA has lost material about the first moon landing and some Mars

missions!

Slide 37/38/39 robots

ASIMO is a robot developed by Honda – I saw him several years ago in this

very room. He can walk up stairs with human –like movement – he also can

take penalty kicks.

This is Boris – researchers in the UK announced that within six months Boris

will have enough control to gently fill the dishwasher!

This company has made exoskeletons –robots that attach to your legs to help

you walk – great for disabilities.

Slide 40 Brain Computer Interface video

Another emerging areas is BCI - Brain Computer Interface… here peoples thoughts

are measured electrically and used to control devices e.g. move a cursor on the

screen or in this case a quadriplegic woman drinks a cup of coffee by controlling the

robots with her thoughts.

A variation is brain to brain interface – and Duke University in the US has recorded

brain signals from a rat and emailed them to a lab in Brazil where they were

transmitted to a rat who performed the very same task as the US rat.

Slide 41/42 3D printing

3D printing allows you to make 3d objects by printing layers of material on top of

each other to get the desired shape – here is a prosthetic leg.

Now, think outside the box – what else could we do?

Well, in China they have built a row of small huts – this US one is building a large

house! Imagine a field, a machine – and coming back a week later to a housing

estate!

Slide 43 Driverless Car

Imagine a car with no steering wheel? It could become an entertainment space!

Would you even need a driving licence?

Slide 44 the Internet of Things

At the moment the internet is mostly for connecting people with people or

information. The next phase devices will be connected that will talk to each other –

your car will contact the garage when it needs a service, your fridge will order food!

Here is a video that will give some surprising insights…

Slide 45 Shift Happens 2014

Slide 46 Summary

In summary

There are lots of exciting opportunities in engineering – you can go to deep

technical expertise or more broad. An engineering qualification is a passport

to many exciting careers – it allows great flexibility and you will be prepared

for change!

Choose a course that will give you the skills to adapt with your career as you

move through life

The world will be very different in the few short years you spend in college

than it is now. Just because certain areas may appear attractive at the

moment does not mean that will remain the case e.g. construction. – lots of

jobs despite media reports

Take the opportunity to talk to the staff at colleges - they will offer sound and

practical advice. They are only too happy to talk with you – attend open days

This is just a whistle-stop tour to engineering – look at STEPS website for

more information

Good Luck with your studies and choices!

Slide 47 VISIT US at stand 64

Finally – visit us at stand 64 - SMART FUTURES where you can get a copy of the

ENGINEERING YOUR FUTURE booklet.

THANK YOU FOR COMING THIS MORNING!

Any Questions...

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