• Question: Are computers getting used more often when engineering?

    Asked by talha to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 18 Jun 2014.
    • Photo: Claire Brockett

      Claire Brockett answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      hi talha
      good question. Yes they are, in my field anyway. Some of the work I do – the testing of joint replacements – takes months to get an answer as we run the machines for days on end, whereas computer models take much less time to predict the outcome. But we don’t just depend on the computers – we often run models alongside experiments to make sure they come out with the same answer.
      Computers are also really good for looking at medical images, and we can can build computer models based on the shape of real medical scans which helps us to mimic real life much better!

    • Photo: Alex Lyness

      Alex Lyness answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Hey talha,

      I think all industries are using computers more and more. They get more powerful and smaller all the time. Super computers allow millions of calculations to be performed that produce really good models of complex systems like the Earth’s climate. Sometimes they’re used for more fun things like rendering CGI movies.

      Design software like CAD is becoming easier to use and one day will allow people to 3D print objects in their own home.

      If you can while you’re at school you should learn to ‘touch’ type on a keyboard as the faster you can type the easier it will be to use computers in the future.

      I wish I’d learnt when I was younger 🙁

    • Photo: Kate Niehaus

      Kate Niehaus answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I rely very heavily on my computer for my current work! Whether it’s writing up a paper, making a presentation, analyzing data, storing data, finding journal articles that are relevant, etc, etc – I’m using my computer.

      I think that this is common for engineers. As you go along, you learn how to write computer code and how to implement math equations into code. This is so much faster that solving things out by hand! Now there’s also really large and powerful computers that can analyze data faster and faster than ever before.

    • Photo: Marcus Johns

      Marcus Johns answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Absolutely. As with the others I pretty much spend everyday in front of my computer – the only time I’m not there is when I’m in the lab or when I’m having lunch! In fact, even when I’m in the lab I’m using computers. The digital microscope, an image of which you can find on my profile, requires a computer to run it and if I end up using 3D printing or electrospinning (in which a very thin fibre is formed from a solution) in my project a computer will be needed to control the process.

      Engineers use programmes on computers to help with complicated calculations or to solve mathematical models. They use them to speed up the process of designing things – it’s much easier to use copy and paste rather than draw the same image over and over by hand – and allows them to see the end product in 3D without having to build it. It also makes it much easier and quicker to communicate things to each other – adding an attachment to an email is much better than having to send stuff in the post!

      In factories computers are used to control the process to make the products and to alert engineers if there’s a problem. Aeronautical engineers now design aircraft that wouldn’t be able to fly if there weren’t computers on board that could carry out thousands of calculations every second – the Eurofighter Typhoon being an example.

      It’s amazing to think that the computing power in your home computer or laptop today is more powerful than the computers they used to get man to the moon in the 1960s. I think it’s now got to the point that if we didn’t have computers we wouldn’t be able to do our work.

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