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Engineering the Future

Engineering is an ever-changing industry. We may not know the future with certainty but there are clear signs of developments to come.

Nanotechnology

NANOTECHNOLOGY PROMISES to have a huge impact on engineering. It is best considered as a catch-all description of activities at the level of atoms and molecules that have applications in the real world. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre, that is, about 1/80,000 of the diameter of human hair, or ten times the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

The discovery of spinning molecular structures seems to herald the beginning of the ‘bottom-up’ stage of nanotechnology. These structures may open the door to understanding the basis of power generation and controllable motion at the molecular level, with huge applications in many industries, but none more than medicine.

It will provide earlier and better diagnostics and treatment will combine earlier and more precisely targeted drug delivery. Nanotechnology, in the form of flexible films containing miniaturised electrodes, is expected to improve the performance of retinal, cochlear and neural implants. It could also lead to the miniaturisation of medical diagnostic and sensing tools. In this respect, nanotechnology could enable developing nations to leapfrog older technologies, in the way that copper wire and optical fibre telephony were superseded by mobile phones.

Another feature of nanotechnology is that it is the one area of research and development that is truly multidisciplinary. Research at the nanoscale is unified by the need to share knowledge on tools and techniques, as well as information on the physics affecting atomic and molecular interactions. Materials scientists, mechanical and electronic engineers and medical researchers are now forming teams with biologists, physicists and chemists.

Energy

A cursory glance at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) website leaves us in no doubt that energy is the major issue exercising the minds of engineers and scientists alike. The major research highlights listed on the website are: ‘Efficiency begins at home’; ‘Locking carbon in’; ‘Bioenergy benefits fusion’; and ‘Fusion: the materials challenge’.

More and more of our engineers, regardless of their discipline, are involved in projects concerned in some way with the problem of energy. A combination of rising energy prices, fears over potential disruption to power supplies in the coming years, and mounting evidence that the UK is not on course to meet the government’s carbon emissions targets, all mean that the subject of energy is currently never far from the headlines. The immediate challenges facing engineers are to reduce emissions from carbon-based fossil fuels, to identify alternative sources of energy and to help manage the economic transfer of dependency from one source to another. Replacing nuclear energy with nuclear fusion offers the potential for limitless, environmentally friendly energy. However, it is unlikely to realise this potential for some time and, until then, engineers will have to come up with ways of extending the lives of the nuclear power stations and developing alternative sources of energy.