UCL Sutton Scholars – ‘Engineering to Change the World’
Discovery Day, 9th April 2014 – Research Writing Honourable
Mention
Nazra, George Green’s School
Engineers do a lot to help us; the water we drink, the roads we travel on, the building we see
– they were designed by civil engineers and without engineers we wouldn’t be able to do
many of the things we need to every single day.
Civil engineering is not the only type of engineering. There are many, some of them are:
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Mechanical engineering – designing cost effective equipment to help improve safety
and reliability. They also make sure the product will perform consistently in a given
environment.
Electrical engineering – they design, make and maintain electrical systems directing
their attention onto the economy, reliability, safety, sustainability and quality of the
product.
Nuclear engineering – nuclear engineers look at how nuclear energy can be used
and in what way it should be used.
Software engineering – these are the people that create the games that people play
on their PlayStations or Xbox’s. Not only those, software developers make
programmes that we use every single day like Microsoft Word or games such as Fifa.
Bioengineering – biological engineers study life forms and living organisms. They
experiment with ideas and do things such as sustaining a life form with chemistry or
they may study single-celled organisms, more scientific than some of the other fields
in engineering.
Agricultural engineering – designing machinery and buildings for farms and finding
environmentally friendly energy sources such as wind turbines. Agricultural
engineering is one of the fastest-changing fields.
Aerospace engineering – it specialises in the designing, making and testing of
planes, helicopters, satellites and spacecraft.
There are also other types of engineer but these are some of the well-known ones.
Engineers solve the problems that we face and help us. Our everyday lives are affected by
what they do, usually for the better. For example, disaster prevention: if there were frequent
earthquakes in a certain area lots of buildings would be destroyed and it would cost lives.
One thing engineers could do is design buildings that are ‘earthquake proof’. In San
Francisco, after a disastrous earthquake, they designed buildings that were less likely to
break down resulting in less injury and death toll. The building has a pyramid shape to keep
it from falling; the base is larger than the top so that it is more stable. If you shake a
rectangle it is more likely to topple over than a pyramid.
The Transamerica Pyramid, an earthquake proof building
in San Francisco.