Practical Engineering

Despite the hazard they pose, trains have to coexist with our other forms of transportation. Next time you pull up to a crossbuck, take a moment to appreciate the sometimes simple, sometimes high-tech, but always quite reliable ways that grade crossings keep us safe.

It is a challenging endeavor to put any tunnel below the sea, and this monumental project faced some monumental hurdles. From complex cretaceous geology, to managing air pressure, water pressure, and even financial pressure, there are so many technical details I think are so interesting about this project.

A single modern diesel freight locomotive can deliver upwards of 50 tons of forward force (called tractive effort) into the rails, but it’s somehow able to do that through the tiny contact patches between two smooth and rigid surfaces. It’s just slick on slick.

All of our lives benefit in some way from this enormous control over Earth’s freshwater resources. But those benefits come at a cost, and the price isn’t just the dollars we’ve spent on the infrastructure but also the impacts dams have on the environment. This kind of balancing act is really at the heart of what a lot of engineering is all about.

Drawing the line between what’s worth the investment and what’s just gilding the electric lily is tough on such a small scale, multiplied by several islands, and with such a quickly growing portfolio of renewable energy sources.

Everyone has a different perspective about what it means for humanity to live harmoniously with all the other life we share the planet with. I think it’s fascinating how those ideas and endeavors trickle down through engineering into the real world.

We’re in the growing pains stage right now, working out the bugs that these new types of energy generation create, but if you pay attention to what’s happening in the industry, it’s mostly good news. A lot of people from all sides of the industry are working really hard on these engineering challenges so that we’ll soon come out with a more reliable, sustainable, and resilient grid on the other end.

Geomagnetic storms aren’t the only thing that can make the grid behave in funny ways. There are devices even in your own home that force the grid to produce power and move it through the system, even though they aren’t even consuming it.

This is a crazy case study of how common sense can fall through the cracks of strained budgets and rigid oversight from federal, state, and city staff. And the lessons that came out of it aren’t just relevant to people who work on bridges. It's a story of how numerous small mistakes by individuals can collectively lead to a tragedy.

Bridge substructures are among the strongest engineered systems on the planet. And yet, bridge foundations are built in some of the least ideal places for heavy loading.

Natural gas is one of the most important resources on the planet right now. It’s driven countless innovations that benefit nearly everyone in a huge variety of ways. And so, even if you had never heard of New London, Texas before now, you can feel fairly confident that, all these decades later, you’ve also benefited in some way from the hard lessons learned there in 1937.

Whether you’re trying to protect a multi-million dollar structure or just keep your basement dry, subsurface drains get the water out without getting the soil out too.

Massive highway interchanges are a nice reminder of our capacity for grand designs and ambitious projects, even if they might not always be the best solutions.

Of course, we have a lot of room for improvement in how we think about and manage solid waste in this world. Landfills seem like an environmental blight, but really, properly designed ones play a huge role in making sure waste products don’t end up in our soil or air or water.

Digital systems interact with every aspect of our daily lives and basic needs: water, electricity, sanitation, public health, transportation, and more can all be seriously disrupted by someone or some group, anywhere in the world, if we let our guard down. With great computer power comes great computer responsibility. And just because many of these industrial control systems are only used or understood by a small number of people, security through obscurity just isn’t realistic anymore.

There’s a lot changing in the construction industry, and a lot of growth in the need for materials like sand and gravel. But I don’t think it’s fair to say the world is running out of those materials. We’re just more aware of all the costs involved in procuring them, and hopefully taking more account for how they affect our future and the environment.

An overview of the Taum Sauk pumped storage facility, the failure of its upper reservoir in 2005, and the rebuilding process.

In a world full of straight lines and right angles, I love that every once in a while, it just makes good engineering sense to use curvy shapes to accomplish a really important job.

The grid is not only mechanically and electrically complicated; it’s financially complicated, too. We don’t really participate in all that complexity - we just pay our bill at the end of every month. But it does affect us in big ways, so I think it’s important at least to understand the basics.