Higher Options 2014 - 17 th , 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).
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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…