Episode 1 Engineering for the World

In the quest to reduce CO2 emissions,

the government has set a target that 15% of our electricity will come from renewable fuels by 2015.

Much of this will be wind power, and wind farms are now being built all over the UK.

So today we're up on Carno. We're in Mid-Wales.

The weather's not very great, as you can see, but it's quite exciting.

We've got the third turbine going up at Carno 2.

So Carno 2 is going to be comprised of 12 turbines.

They're 1.3 megawatts each, which should generate enough to power a lot of local homes in the community.

A 1.3 megawatt turbine at a good site would produce enough power for over 700 households.

The principle of generating power from the wind is quite straightforward.

The wind travels over the blades, causing them to turn.

That causes the generator to turn.

The electricity that's generated is fed through cables in the tower,

from there it goes to the National Grid where you can make a cup of tea with it.

So, each turbine must function as a mini power station, and the nacelle

at the top of the tower holds the key components.

The slow turning blades drive a shaft, which goes into a gearbox.

This gearbox then increases the rotational speed going

into the generator, which produces electricity.

A computer system, controlled by the weather vane on top of the nacelle,

keeps the turbine facing into the wind. If it's too windy, a brake slows the turbine down

so that the stresses on the tower are reduced

and the turbine isn't damaged.

When you see components lying on the ground and being put together and

assembled you really get a feel for how big the turbine is and what an amazing piece of engineering it is.

But there has to be enough wind to keep the turbines turning.

So how do they plan where the wind farm should be built?

Down at ground level today we're looking at wind speeds up to maybe 10mph, which means up at the hub

height of 50 meters, we'd be looking up to maybe 15mph, so you can tell from these sort of wind speeds,

we're on a very well-exposed site which is ideal for developing a wind farm.

As a wind engineer, we're specifically interested in

how the wind flows across the site, so we're looking at the topography,

how trees on the site might affect the wind flow, but we also

have to bear in mind physical constraints such as public rights of way,

ecological designations within the site, what the noise impact of the wind farm might be.

Once we've been onsite, we can map all our findings in the computer and then start to build up an idea

of what the wind farm might look like.

As you can see, the turbine parts are pretty big.

There's a tower section coming up the road now.

So when we're designing the site it's not a simple matter of just picking a turbine, we have to look at what size

of turbine we can actually physically get to the site.

Wind energy is a great clean source of energy.

Once you've built the turbines you've got no emissions into the atmosphere.

The energy used to build the turbines and install them typically

is paid back within six or seven months of them being operational.

So once that period has passed, you've got, you know, free electricity, really, from the wind.

But not everyone thinks wind power is the answer.

If they were to build turbines here, I don't think I could live here.

We would lose the isolation, we would lose the wonderful views,

and it would no longer be quiet.

Turbines will produce some noise.

However, as a developer you have to work

to very strict guidelines on what noise is allowable at local property.

The real reason, apart from all the side issues, is that they don't really work.

They're not an answer to our need for a secure supply of energy,

and they are incredibly expensive.

It's a really common misconception from the public that

wind farms just don't work, which is just completely not true.

A well-sited wind farm can be expected to produce electricity at least 80% of the time and

developers wouldn't put them up if they didn't work.

Sadly, wherever you go, you seem to be seeing turbines.

Mid-Wales is becoming just full of turbines.

So if you don't want them in your back yard,

maybe building them offshore is the answer.

We built North Hoyle approximately five years ago.

And we've just received consent for Gwyntamor which is a large site

with 200 plus turbines, which is sufficient for about 500,000 homes,

or 40% of the homes in Wales.

Wind turbines offshore are not only out of the way, but also

operate more efficiently because wind speeds are more consistent.

And the further offshore they're built, the more wind there is and the better the energy return.

It'll definitely contribute to reducing the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel stations, as every

kilowatt we produce is a kilowatt that doesn't have to be produced from a fossil fuel power plant.

It's never going to replace fossil fuels but it's certainly

a very good complementary power source to go with them, and when we've got

such natural resources available in the UK it seems a shame not to make use of them.

Enough sunlight falls on the Earth every minute to meet the world's energy demands for an entire year.

If we could find a way to harness this we would have a clean,

inexhaustible and efficient energy source.

Solar energy is the most abundant energy resource

which we have on the Earth.

Now this is the first time we really use directly this solar energy,

and we convert it directly into power.

So, here on the southern plains of Spain where the sun shines

for over 200 days a year, it's an ideal testing ground.

This is not only one solar plant, this is an entire solar power complex.

We have here the largest solar power research facility in the world.

And one technology that the engineers have developed

is known as the Solar Tower of Power, which stands like a cathedral on the plains of Andalucia.

This is the first commercial tower operating with this technology in the world.

This plant has been operating since July 2007

and at this moment it's producing electricity for about 6,000 homes.

A field of 624 mirrors called heliostats track the sun throughout the day.

They reflect its rays up to one point at the very top of this tower, called a receiver.

We are at the middle height of the tower.

We concentrate the heat up for 1,000 times in order to generate temperatures of about 500 Celsius

and produce the steam in the boiler that is at the top of the receiver.

The receiver is like a giant boiler.

Behind it are pipes full of water.

The concentrated solar radiation

heats up the water to create steam

which is stored in a tank.

The steam is used to drive a turbine

which turns a generator

to produce electricity.

And because this technology has proved to be so successful, engineers are working on a new tower

which will produce almost twice as much power.

But here they are also testing another solar energy system.

What you see here are parabolic trough collectors.

And in these collectors you see that the sun will be concentrated

by mirrors which are shaped in a parabolic form.

The collector itself moves so that it is always in an optimum position towards the sun.

The sun's rays are concentrated on to a heat absorbing pipe that contains synthetic oil.

This oil is heated up to 400 degrees Celsius, and then pumped through a

series of heat exchangers in order to produce superheated steam.

This plant is designed to deliver 50 megawatts of electricity to supply

about 25,000 households here in close-by Seville with electricity.

The trough system currently produces more electricity than the tower, but

they suspect that in time the tower could prove to be more efficient.

But both systems have a problem when the sun goes down.

Currently in our tower plants we store the heat in the form of steam.

But they can only store the heat for up to an hour so engineers have to find a better solution.

One idea they've come up with is to use salt.

What we do is we heat this salt beyond 220 degrees centigrade.

It will melt, it will be crystal clear and it will be a substance like water.

The molten salt can be heated to a much higher temperature than water

without boiling, so it's easier to store.

And it'll contain more heat for longer.

The engineers can then release this stored heat when the sun isn't shining.

So it looks like solar power could become a viable option for the future.

We will be generating with the whole platform in operation, electricity for about 200,000 homes.

That's about the size of a city like Seville.

We hope that we will build in the future similar plants like you have

today in coal or nuclear, which are plants of 700 - 800 megawatt size.

So this I think is a big challenge for the future.

We live in a world where the demand for energy is growing.

And with fossil fuels limited, and rising concerns over climate change,

there is an urgent need to find new ways of producing power.

One of the most challenging ideas is to adapt the process that powers the sun.

It's called nuclear fusion.

Here at Culham Science Centre, they've been working on fusion for over 30 years.

On a fusion reactor, instead of burning coal or gas

we are fusing the fuels, which in this case are hydrogen isotopes

called deuterium and tritium,

to create energy and then we use that energy to produce electricity.

In nuclear fusion, atoms of hydrogen fuse together to form helium and release energy.

This is quite different from fission, the splitting of atoms,

which occurs in the nuclear power stations operating today.

But fission produces a lot of radioactive waste.

The good news is fusion, what we do here, also creates a lot of energy

and the upside is this doesn't produce nearly as much radioactive waste as fission does.

But to make this reaction happen, you have to heat up the hydrogen

to 100 million degrees so it forms a plasma.

And somehow this has to be contained.

One way to think of it is, it's like putting the sun in a bottle.

If you imagine trying to keep that contained, it's very, very difficult.

We have solved the problem with a configuration we call the tokamak.

In this chamber we can achieve temperatures which are 10 times higher than the sun.

A tokamak is a machine, shaped like a doughnut, that produces a powerful magnetic field.

This field confines the plasma. It's like a magnetic bottle.

We've built this machine here at Culham called JET.

Typically 20 or 30 times a day we run a pulse which is anywhere between

30 seconds to a minute long and during that time we get fusion to occur.

In these images fusion is seen actually happening.

More fusion has been produced here at JET than anywhere else on Earth.

But it's a long way short of a commercial reactor.

Now JET here you can see operating at very high temperature,

so this will be above 100 million degrees.

Fusion is taking place as we speak there.

JET can only run for a maximum time of about a minute.

Unfortunately, JET can't produce enough power to sustain itself.

Roughly you get back as much fusion power as you put in,

in heating power, and of course that's useless for a power station.

It's got to be a bigger device, got to last longer.

Physics says if you build a machine about

10 times the size of this machine you can get about 20 or 30 times the power out that you put in, so

the idea is, after JET, we will build a machine about 10 times the size.

The next step is ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor,

a globally-funded prototype to be built in the south of France.

And many of the systems for ITER are being developed and tested here at JET.

The hope is that instead of running for a minute like JET, ITER will run continuously for up to an hour.

This creates dramatic new problems for any components inside

the reactor, like the tiles which line the inside of the tokamak.

At the moment, the tiles are made of carbon fibre composite material.

In our machine it is an excellent material, but it has one fatal flaw.

A carbon wall could soak up the tritium that we inject in the plasma

and this is a radioactive gas and it's also a valuable gas.

So beryllium we've now chosen, because the amount of tritium it can retain is much, much lower.

Beryllium won't absorb the tritium from the plasma.

But its melting point is lower than carbon fibre, which means

the engineers must devise ways to prevent the tiles getting too hot.

By having this curved shape we can actually reduce the heat

by spreading it over a much larger region.

Within each block, there are actually these grooves, and these are to allow for

the tile to expand when it's heated and this is to prevent cracking, which might otherwise occur.

These new tiles for ITER will be tested here at JET.

And after ITER, the plan is to build an even bigger machine working as a commercial fusion plant.

Clearly, that's still many years away.

But it's a route that the engineers and scientists at JET believe we need to take.

Fusion still offers great potential for future energy sources.

Huge reserves of fuels for thousands of years.

It's environmentally very reasonable and passively safe, so yeah,

it's a very good option for future energy supply.

Not everyone agrees.

We don't know a fusion reactor would be safe.

We know there's a huge distance between laboratory experiments

and working commercial reactors, and we don't know how much waste that they're going to produce.

So we can't have assurances that fusion is going to be a safe technology.

It's still 30 to 50 years away.

We should be deploying other alternatives rather than investing in a dream that fusion might still be.

But people working at Culham are convinced that if they're to make

faster progress developing fusion, we have to invest more.

It's very frustrating, really.

At the moment, where we speak as though energy

is an enormously important issue, we're spending far less on energy R&D now than we did in the '80s.

There's quite a lot of R&D that still needs to be done.

If it works it will be fantastic. It's a fantastic challenge.

Once upon a time, it used to be pretty obvious how a razor worked.

Things got slightly less scary with the invention of the safety razor

in 1901, and even safer when the electric shaver came along in 1931.

But now they've evolved into such sleek, sophisticated,

powerful machines, how do they work?

To some degree all electric shavers work the same way today as

when they were invented, with the same components.

The shaver works like this.

By pressing start, the battery gets powered up, powering up the motor

where the head starts to move from side to side, making the blades oscillate under the foil

so that when each hair gets into the foil it's being cut off between the blade and the foil.

That's how all shavers work. This is our most advanced system, which got a totally new motor in place.

What we've got in the Series 7 shaver, it's very special,

it's an oscillating motor.

That's different to regular shavers because in regular shavers

we have a rotating motor, then we have a gear system.

The gear system is translating this rotation to an oscillation and on the

way from the rotation system to the oscillation system we have losses.

The outer part of the foil cassette consists of the foil, which is

a very thin metal layer which has a thickness of only 58 microns.

The thinner this foil is, the closer you can cut the hairs.

Very important for a good cut is the permanent contact between

foil and blade.

It means the foil and the blade are working against each other, like a scissor.

We give power to the motor and then we take signals which come back from the motor.

The software inside reacts on the behaviour of the motor and identifies if there is a stronger beard or less

beard on top of the shaver and then it reacts in an intelligent way

and provides the power at the right time.

It's like driving a car. If you see a hill is coming up, of course you will

accelerate because you want to keep the speed of the car.

And that's how we make an electric shaver.

Wherever we go, we seem to surround ourselves with music and other sounds.

BEEPING

Behind all this noise is the ubiquitous loudspeaker.

Some speakers are small enough to fit in our ears,

others are big enough to annoy the neighbours - they're everywhere.

VOICE SPEAKS OVER INTERCOM

But how does a loudspeaker work?

This is a three-way basic hi-fi loudspeaker that we make here.

It consists of three main constituent parts

that produce the sound that you hear.

We have here a cutaway unit. If I connect up the tweeter which plays in the middle here...

WHOOSHING

..you can hear it plays a very high frequency noise.

And then if I go to the outside of that, we have the mid-range driver...

LOWER-PITCHED WHOOSHING

and then the woofer at the bottom plays the low frequency component.

VERY LOW-PITCHED WHOOSHING

All three of those together give us the full spectrum of audio

that we hear when we listen to music.

Each three of these drive units, although very different in size,

essentially work by the same way.

They have a cone that moves back and forth and pumps the air to make the sound.

The way we get this movement is by a magnet system

and having a voice coil which is the copper coil of wire

which is attached directly to the cone that sits within the magnetic field.

The current, the electricity, comes through these two wires

which goes round the voice coil, and when it's in the magnetic field

it will move up and down, which moves the air which makes the sound.

Now, the whole thing works by the signal coming into the back of the unit

which then comes into this filter board of electronics you can see at the bottom here.

The job of this is purely to split the signal into the three parts

that get fed to the tweeter, the mid-range and the woofer separately,

and all play obviously at the same time.

The cabinet is an integral part of the loudspeaker.

To show you that, I've taken this drive unit out.

It's still connected at the back.

So if I just play some music through the normal loud speaker...

DANCE MUSIC WITH HEAVY BASS

So if I just remove the connections

and place them on the one without the cabinet...

MUSIC CONTINUES WITH REDUCED BASS

..you can hear there's a big reduction in the amount of bass output.

And the reason for that is that the driver works by moving air.

The cone moves forwards and backwards

and the cone is open to the air on the reverse side as well.

If you don't have a cabinet blocking the front half from the back half,

air that we push forwards from the front just travels round to the back, it doesn't radiate sound.

So we need to put it in the cabinet to enclose this rear radiation.

And that's how you make a loudspeaker.

Since lawnmowers were first invented, mowing the lawn has become a national pastime.

So much so that we buy more lawnmowers than any other country apart from the US.

It's almost an obsession.

But just how does a lawnmower work?

What we have here is one of our hover collect mowers that we manufacture here.

We've had this one cut away so that you can see the internal workings of the machine.

And on the table we have some of the key components

that go into making a hover mower.

I'm going to start here with the switchbox that controls the machine

and by pulling on this we energise the switch.

It supplies electricity down this cable into the motor.

When the motor is energised, it turns, which in turn drives this belt

and on the hub is mounted the impellor, which creates airflow,

and the blade that we use to cut the grass.

This component is called the impellor.

When it revolves it draws air in through this air inlet,

comes into the centre of the fan and because the fan is rotating

the air gets blown out of the periphery of the fan.

What that does is it creates a high pressure region underneath the machine.

This creates lift to hover the product.

The next crucial part is the blade. This is mounted below the impellor.

This is one that we have off the machine.

This particular machine has a steel blade on it.

One of the most important things about the blade is

a safety requirement, it needs to withstand an impact.

This particular test is called the stake impact test.

What we do is we have this steel bar and we fire that up into the path of the blade

whilst the machine is running at full speed.

We don't want any parts of the blade to break up and get thrown out of the machine.

MOTOR RUNS

MOTOR STOPS ABRUPTLY

OK, what we see here is we see the impact on one of the blade tips.

The blade is bent, but the important thing is that nothing has been broken,

nothing has been thrown out of the machine, so this is a pass.

The interesting thing is not only is it hovering on a cushion of air and cutting the grass,

but it also works like a vacuum cleaner because it sucks up the grass clippings as it goes.

So if I just lift the lid, and drop the grass catcher in...

If you remember the impellor is below here, so it's drawing air out of this grass box.

When we close the lid it draws air in, into the grass box

and as we go along the vents at the back

enables grass clippings and air to be drawn in behind the machine.

So there you go. These are all the parts that go into making a lawnmower.

The stunning views in the Swiss Alps

make driving through the mountains an amazing experience.

But as more and more trucks use Switzerland as a shortcut between the north and south of Europe,

the roads are becoming seriously overcrowded, causing traffic jams and massive pollution.

Today traffic which cross Switzerland have to go up to

1,100 metres above sea level, cross the Alps through the existing tunnel,

and then they go down to Milano.

The Swiss have now decided to make the trucks take the train.

These trains will avoid the mountains because of a revolutionary new flat tunnel

which is being built at the bottom of the Alps, level with the valleys.

At the moment we are here at the north entrance of the tunnel here,

and it's going flat through the Alps.

The Gotthard Base rail tunnel will be the longest, deepest tunnel in the world.

It's also the world's biggest building site.

The longest tunnel in the world with 57 kilometres.

We create the deepest tunnel, 2,500 metres deep inside the mountain.

And the world's longest, deepest tunnel needs the world's biggest tunnelling machine.

Controlling the tunnelling machine so it stays on course is a job for the surveyors.

Well, it starts before the construction works already.

You have to put up a reference network, with reference points and you do that with GPS.

Here across the Alps there is a network of about 30 points.

Using these GPS points, they establish the precise direction the tunnel has to take.

You take the information from the GPS points and everything works electronically, of course, today.

And you can transfer the direction of the GPS network into the tunnel.

But GPS can't be used inside the tunnel, so the surveyors transfer the data

along the length of the tunnel, by setting up a series of reference points.

This allows the tunnel-boring machine

constantly to correct its direction using these reference points.

You continuously go forward.

Building new reference points in the tunnel every 400 metre

and the data is going directly electronically from our instruments to the tunnel-boring machine.

To speed up the tunnel making, they've been digging the tunnel in five separate sections.

And that makes the precision of the surveying crucial.

So far, each breakthrough, when two sections of tunnel meet, has been hugely successful.

The tunnels have lined up with pinpoint accuracy.

The main thing here is that it's a very long tunnel,

and the longer the tunnel, the more you have to pay attention to the precision.

Because you make only small error at the beginning of the tunnel

it will get bigger and bigger, and the longer the tunnel is,

the bigger the error will be at the breakthrough.

If the breakthrough is more than 25 centimetres out,

the consequences are more than just hurt professional pride.

We don't get paid the whole sum because then you have to correct the tunnel.

You know it means more construction work and it will cost a lot of money.

Keeping the tunnel straight and level isn't the only problem for the tunnel makers.

There's also the problem of what to do with the vast quantity of waste rock.

Every day arrives at this point here 8,000 tonnes.

Totally, 25 million tonnes in 10 years.

Half of the waste will be used in the building of the new railway line outside of the tunnel.

In the past the rest would have been used in landfill,

but there's a limit to how much landfill is needed.

The environmentally-friendly engineers decided

to tackle the waste problem with a unique approach.

Why not recycle the waste rock and use it for concrete for the tunnel?

We are the first and the only one in the world which recycled this material.

The stone chips in the waste were always thought too angular and sharp to use safely in the concrete.

Before, nobody knows what to do with stone like this.

We searched for about four years for the right equipment to produce the sand and the gravel.

They eventually solved the problem with a special grinding machine

which produced perfect sand and gravel for making high-quality concrete.

All the concrete is made from this material and all the concrete we made it on the construction site.

30% of the material we recycled and used to produce the concrete.

The concrete is used to build the lining of the tunnel.

The flat railway link here is built to save travelling time

from the north of the Alps to the south of the Alps.

And of course also to save energy because the train consumes less energy

if it goes flat instead of going above the mountains.

The tunnel is due to open in 2015, and will be used for both trains carrying trucks and for passengers.

With no mountains to climb some trains will be able to travel at up to 250 kilometres an hour.

This will free up the mountain roads,

allowing drivers space to enjoy the scenery.

It resembles a large spaceship that's landed in the middle of a field in south England.

I think it looks like a giant metal doughnut.

Outside Oxford, a new kind of microscope is taking shape.

But it's unlike any microscope you may have seen before. It's vast.

The size of five football pitches.

And it's the most powerful microscope in the world.

In this building we have a machine which is a series of

super microscopes using X-rays, 100 billion times brighter than the sun,

to study the atomic and molecular nature of materials in use in the world around us.

And we produce those X-rays by accelerating electrons to very high speeds, close to the speed of light.

It's called a synchrotron.

Synchrotron light has been used for all kinds of discoveries.

From looking at viruses, and proteins from bacteria, diseases,

also looking at materials, which is going to impact hugely on engineering.

But just how does a synchrotron work and how do they accelerate electrons close to the speed of light?

The electrons are actually produced at the start of the linear accelerator right here,

in something very much like an old television tube.

And they're created at about walking pace and then they're accelerated

into the booster synchrotron,

and there, their energy's ramped up from 100 mega electron volts up to 3 giga electron volts

and then they're at their full energy and they're injected into storage ring

which is the heart of the synchrotron, and it's here that we produce the X-rays for the users.

And it's these X-rays that scientists want to use for their experiments.

The X-rays are fed into one of the experimental stations

where scientists, ranging from cell biologists to metallurgists, can make use of them.

But just how did Jim and his team go about designing and building such a complex machine?

The challenge for me as head of engineering, was to recruit a team

of now 50 engineers, designers, surveyors and technicians

who all together have been involved with designing this facility

and getting it built and making sure it works.

As engineers we have to talk to the scientists

to get a definition of what it is that they want.

And then we have to be able to produce designs that means we can manufacture it in a practical way,

because the physicists and scientists always want perfection.

But there is a reason they want this perfection.

The electron beam that we use is very small. It's about 10 microns high, the thickness of

a piece of cling film, and it's about 120 microns wide, which is sort of two thicknesses of paper.

So we have to control the position of the electron beam really tightly

so that we're sure that we don't miss any of our samples.

So thousands of tonnes of heavy engineering had to be installed

and aligned to an accuracy of less than the width of a human hair.

An amazing feat of precision engineering.

The next challenge they faced was to devise a way of creating

a vacuum in the synchrotron so that these electrons could circulate close to the speed of light.

This is a part of a vacuum section.

Now, inside here we contain the electron beam.

The vacuum inside here has to be as good as it is in outer space

to allow the electrons to move freely inside the storage ring.

To create the vacuum inside here we use mechanical pumps.

They suck about 99% of the air out.

The molecules that are left are really hard to push out.

So, then we need to bake the system out to drive off those final last molecules.

They do this by placing the vacuum vessel in a special oven and baking it.

And once this is done they have to install it without contaminating it.

Just one fingerprint could ruin the vacuum.

Electrons circulate in this vacuum tube around this storage ring,

and as the electrons circulate, we can work on it with magnets,

such that the electrons give up some of their energy,

which leaks out as photons and is conveyed then to the beamlines to do science with.

The photons are pulses of X-rays and the magnets that produce them are incredibly powerful.

And just to demonstrate how strong these magnets are,

this is an aluminium ruler which normally is non-magnetic,

but if I put it up against these magnets,

the magnets are strong enough to create tiny magnetic fields inside of the aluminium

that actually turns it into something slightly magnetic when it's in that field.

By adjusting the magnetic field that the electron beam passes through, the scientists can produce photons

at the wavelength of light they need for their experiments.

This light is directed into an experimental station

where it hits the sample, to reveal the structure deep within it.

The properties of materials are determined at the nanoscale.

We can study properties at that nanoscale and by doing so,

improve materials, invent new ones and make a better world for ourselves.

The synchrotron is a real feat of engineering.

I particularly enjoyed watching it go from a building site to being a wonderfully working machine.

You're at the cutting edge of science and technology.

The experiments these guys are using this equipment for is absolutely amazing,

so to be part of the team, to help build this is pretty outstanding.

It's been an incredible project to work on.

And what more does an engineer want than something interesting and exciting to build

and the money to do it and great people to work with?

Forecasts suggest that by 2030 CO2 emissions from aviation will account

for a quarter of the UK's total contribution to climate change.

The challenge is to find cleaner, more efficient, more environmentally friendly aero engines

and it's the materials that make up these engines that will be crucial.

This is a Trent 900. It's got thousands of different components in it,

it's an amazing engine.

At maximum take-off conditions, in the centre of the engine

when you burn fuel, there'll be temperatures of over 1,000 degrees centigrade

and every component in this engine works very hard for a living.

As a materials engineer at Rolls-Royce my challenge is to make the materials in this engine

stronger, lighter, allowing the engine to be more efficient.

So, on this quest, Rolls-Royce collaborate with engineers and scientists from all over the world,

including a team from the University of Oxford.

This machine here is called an X-ray diffractometer.

It allows us to study the deformation behaviour of small samples like this

but it can only penetrate the very shallow skin layer of these samples

and in order to be able to go deeper

and learn more about how the deformation of these materials happens

and how their strength develops,

we need to go to a much more powerful device which is called the synchrotron.

The synchrotron uses intense X-ray light to look deep inside materials.

It can reveal the grains that make up a metal.

It's these grains and how they are affected under stress

that determines the strength of a component.

We need to look at the individual grains

from which this metal is composed because the interesting damage processes happen at that scale.

I've been preparing this little nickel sample.

So this bit of material could come from one of the skins in this casing.

The synchrotron generates a number of X-ray beams that are sent down

in to an experimental station, or beamline.

This is where the scientists and engineers can access the X-rays to use in their experiments.

To build up a map of the sample we rest the sample across the beam.

Whilst we're looking at it with the X-ray beam,

we will deform it and then map the deformation and the stresses and the strains within the sample.

So the beam gets delivered to this pinhole, which then hits the sample

-and scatters it to the detector.

-That's it, that's it.

The sample will sit under this X-ray light for five days,

and each microscopic change will be recorded and analysed.

On here you can see a number of spots.

Each of these spots hopefully tells us about the deformation that grain has experienced,

the stresses, strains, the rotation

and everything that we really need to know to be able to compare it to our models.

It assigns numbers to each spot.

Up until now, the models used to build components are based on predictions

but if they can base them on real evidence, then they can design better routes of manufacturing

to make the metal itself stronger.

What we've just seen here is really that your deformation occurs differently in different grains

and that's exactly what we want to show with this experiment,

and it's just very exciting to actually see it

visually in this sort of way. You normally wouldn't see this.

With the synchrotron we can find out what the strains and stresses in each of the grains are

and we can improve our models which will then go into building

predictions for more complex structures like bits of aero engines.

I think the next decade will be the most exciting in material science since the 1950s.

These new tools, new modelling techniques and we've never had these range of opportunities before us.

And the next opportunity will be the ability to look at not just small samples using the synchrotron,

but real, life-size components.

What we've done is we've built a dedicated beamline to support

the engineering community of the UK

and you can see that here as it's currently under construction.

This beamline is called JEEP,

which stands for the Joint Engineering, Environmental and Process beamline.

The purpose of the beamline is to be able to take full-size pieces of commercial

or industrial equipment, for example aircraft.

The new JEEP experimental station will be really special because it has a big laboratory,

which is large enough for us to drive a lorry into

and deliver really large objects, which have been subjected to real in-service loading,

and we can try and reach the holy grail of this whole activity which is to be able to

look at a piece of metal and to be able to say, "Is it still safe or is it no longer safe?"

The understanding grows and with that becomes a more knowledgeable community

and so things become slicker, cheaper, leaner, if you like,

but also fundamentally safer and that's always a big thing in engineering.

We'll be able to make the materials stronger, make them lighter

and therefore our engines will be more environmentally friendly and more reliable.

This is a huge opportunity for all engineers working in this field.

It brings us closer to finding out some of nature's secrets that until then have been hidden,

and I can not think of many things in life that one can do that are more exciting than that.

We tend to associate engineering with huge projects such as building bridges and skyscrapers,

developing the latest transport systems and civil projects.

But there's a whole other world of engineering out there.

Here in Los Angeles there's a group of engineers who see themselves more as artists.

They design the biggest and most breathtaking water features in the world,

fountains which pulse and sway to music.

The great thing about this is we never do the same thing twice.

We're always challenged to do something nobody's ever done before.

That's why I love this job!

And this is where they've assembled their latest creation,

amongst the glitz of Las Vegas, where every hotel is seeking to outshine its neighbour.

The newly-completed Volcano at the Mirage Hotel is no ordinary fountain.

It spews a mixture of fire and water high into the air, simulating the fall of molten lava down its sides,

and belches streams of fire safely to within metres of the audience.

It was warm!

The main challenge on the Volcano was always going to be getting fire

to work alongside its sworn enemy, water. So how did they solve it?

It's by far the largest and most complex fire feature in the world.

In the Volcano show we use water as our lava

so on the top of the volcano when you see the eruption

and you see the lava shooting into the air, that's actually just water with lots and lots of light,

and then we have what we call fire shooters, actually most of them live underwater.

They don't actually shoot their fire from underwater, but they

pop their heads up to do the show, shoot fireballs and go back to sleep under the water.

Some of the effects are generated from inside the volcano, using a range of different technologies.

What we've got here are the crag effects that what you see from the front of the mountain,

we actually shine a series of light through this

and mix the light in such a way that it looks like molten lava

from the other side of the volcano.

We've got gas lines running down through there,

we have the fire effect, we have the fog system that emanates from the crags. So this is the heart of it.

The Volcano is now working and having the desired effect on the crowds.

It was really awesome!

It's a marvellous display.

It's absolutely amazing.

Great, way cool, yeah!

Engineering technologies march relentlessly on and back in their lab

they must stay at least two steps ahead of the game, and they love it.

This is a giant playground for the engineers.

The only way to really find out about our top-secret technologies is to work here.

If you actually look at the engineering business, it is a creative business.

A good engineer is a very creative person, and we seek out the people that understand that in themselves

and that's the beauty of engineering here.

Nobody is assumed to be a follower of the rules,

everybody here is expected to break the rules, create new rules.

When I was little I used to tinker a lot with radios that broke down

or toasters or something like that,

I'd just take them apart and try and fix them.

Usually it didn't work, but sometimes it did,

so I tried mechanical engineering, it was easy for me, it was fun.

All my teachers were great and that's how I got into engineering.

I think this is like the dream engineering job.

Sometimes we gotta create something from absolutely nothing

and it's very interesting and a great company to work for.

I'm lucky to do it straight out of college for sure.

Every day something comes up that tests me.

I'm never bored here.

I think that's what I enjoy most - never just sitting back on what you've done before.

Every single day here we ask ourselves to step up again and to create something new

and that's why I find this to be the perfect job.

I think, basically,

what engineers in the entertainment business do, is we build dreams.

We build other people's dreams.

They tell us what they want, and we try to bring that dream to reality.

I deal a lot with theme park rides.

We take concrete, steel, boring old, cold steel, wire all the bits and pieces you see around you

and build something somebody has never ridden. Something they've never seen before in their life.

There's lots of new exciting things happening in engineering in theme parks.

Old roller coasters used to have a chain that would pull you to the top of the first drop, the first hill.

You'd go clunk-clunk-clunk all the way up and you knew it was coming.

But now they use an electromagnetic launch on roller coasters

where you just sit in the roller coaster going very slowly and all of a sudden

you're shot up to the top of the hill, and you go on your ride.

Acceleration is important to us because from Newton laws of motion

we know that you can't have acceleration without a force.

So we examine the acceleration to see what kind of force is acting on you and the roller coaster.

Essentially a roller coaster is being pushed down a hill.

You're up at the top of the hill, you get pushed down.

But if it's only a simple drop, it's not very interesting,

so we put in a series of drops. So let's draw that.

What we want to know is, when it's down at the bottom here, how fast is it going?

Because what your body is telling you to do, is it's saying go straight.

The roller coaster is saying, no, I'm going to take you up the hill. That means it's got to push on you.

Is it pushing on you too hard, will it hurt you?

Oh no, we're going to the top of this hill and we're still going fast!

And we want to go like this,

but the roller coaster says, no, you're gonna go like that!

If we don't have something to hold us in the roller coaster, we're going to be shot out.

So we want to make sure you have a safe and comfortable restraint that keeps you in the roller coaster.

What we have here is a fairly simple mock-up.

You can see that there is four seating positions, they're abreast.

And they have a type of restraint that's on here.

This is fairly simple, very quick to do, but you gain a lot of information from these very simple mock-ups.

I'm constantly inspired by the engineering that's around me.

Engineering has so many paths, and it's an unlimited area as far as where you want to go.

One of the things I'm most proud of was when I was working for Walt Disney Imagineering,

we built the ABC Times Square Studio and it's got this beautiful, large,

wrap-around sign that goes from 44th Street all the way around to Broadway.

Not only do millions of people get to see it, but as a thank you at the end of the project,

they put our name up in lights, on that sign, so I've had my name up in lights on Broadway!

And not everybody can say that!

A Formula 1 racing car is an example of precision engineering at its best.

The cars are built from scratch every season,

and here at Williams the race is on to develop the car for 2009.

Working in this environment, you're always working at the cutting edge.

It's a great thing to be able to do the very best engineering

for the sake of doing the very best engineering, and the competition spurs that on.

This year's tremendously exciting because of the huge regulation changes that are taking place,

and whenever that happens in the sport, it's an opportunity to stand on the ability of your engineers.

The cars have to meet a set of rules which govern how they're built, and every year, those rules change.

In 2009 the changes are massive.

The cars' aerodynamics, the tyres, the engines -

all have been rethought to make racing more competitive and increase overtaking.

Perhaps the most radical innovation is intended to make racing more exciting

and make the cars more environmentally friendly at the same time.

It's a system called KERS.

KERS stands for Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems

and it's basically about trying to use some of the braking energy when you slow down the car,

extracting that energy from the car, storing it somewhere and then using that energy to accelerate the car.

The energy from braking is used to generate electricity, which is then stored,

either in a battery, or by spinning a mechanical flywheel.

This energy can then be converted back to electrical energy

and used to drive an electric motor to create a power boost when it's needed.

The energy in the KERS will allow you to release about 80 brake horsepower

when the driver presses a button on the steering wheel.

That energy is significant in terms of allowing overtaking moves to take place, so it will be very interesting

to see when one driver uses his KERS system against another.

But as with many developments in Formula 1,

KERS could eventually find uses outside the world of racing.

There is a very wide potential range of applications of those technologies

once you have efficient units developed.

Similar systems apply to road cars or trams or trains, but there are many other examples.

The energy in a lift, for example.

When a lift descends it's got the potential to generate a lot of energy

from the gravity that's working on the lift.

So that can be used to generate energy which

can be stored somewhere to help the lift go up the next time it goes up.

The engineers here will now need to develop KERS

as fast as possible to gain an advantage over the other teams.

My job is a lot of fun and it's a challenge every day.

If you work in the normal car industry you design parts for a year or two until they get on the car,

and here it sometimes take only a week.

When I first started here and my first parts were actually fitted to the car

and I knew they were racing I was really worried in case something breaks.

You watch the race and think, "Oh my God, I hope it doesn't break!"

I like designing parts and calculating that they work, and I like to look into detail,

I like opening stuff and knowing how they work, how the mechanics work and I love that.

I think the thing about engineering is not to underestimate what a creative subject it is.

Engineering is a fantastic career.

It offers you the opportunity to develop new technologies on a daily basis.

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