Engineering Matters
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Engineering Matters
Five times winner of the Publisher Podcast Awards, including Best Technology Podcast, Engineering Matters celebrates the work of engineers who use ingenuity, practicality, science, theory and determination to build a better world. In the UK alone 5.7million people work in engineering related enterpr...
Recent Episodes
410 episodes
#359k Transit-Oriented Communities in Toronto
Around the world, urban planners are seeking to deliver urban growth and increase access to city centres through the development of transit-oriented c...
#359j – Modern Vernacular in Saudi Arabia
In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia, buoyed by a surge in oil prices, embarked on an ambitious building programme. The country moved rapidly to develop its cit...
#359i Stone as Structure
For facade specialists, stone is highly prized for its performance and character. The right choice of stone can anchor a building in its local context...
#359h Sustainability in Paris
Sustainability experts often use a hierarchy to help their thinking about interventions. The best way to limit your impact is to do nothing at all. If...
#359g An Intergenerational Approach to Sustainability
Lifecycle carbon assessment – the process of monitoring the total carbon footprint of a structure from the first spade in the ground to demolition – s...
#359f Sustainability and Adaptation in East London
Retrofitting is an instrumental step in reducing the carbon footprint of a city’s building stock. It also extends the life of a building and has a low...
#359e A Better View of Stadium Design
When you are designing a stadium for the World Cup, or any major sport, it’s vital to have a fan’s-eye view. For more than a century, the architects t...
#359d A Digital Path to Nuclear’s New Generation
Nuclear power promises to provide energy when other sources can’t. But nuclear plants currently take a long time to build—often more than a decade. An...
#359c A Fusion of Minds at ITER
At ITER, in France, scientists and engineers from around the world are working together to develop nuclear fusion at power plant scale. The project co...
#359b Water, Energy and the Environment in the Middle East
There is a changing view of the environment among public sector clients in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has ambitious goals like generating 50% of el...
#359a Australia’s Most Flooded Town
Lismore sits at the confluence of two rivers in New South Wales. Covering more than 1,300 square kilometres, it is home to more than 44,000 people. In...
#359 Intro – A Sustainable and Resilient World
Society needs to consider the impact of climate change on our cities because it is no longer a future challenge; it is a present reality. Cities with...
#358 Experts in Risk
Residents of tall buildings can face significant risks in the event of fire or structural failure. At Grenfell Tower in the UK, a fire in a resident’s...
#357c Well-Grounded Decisions: Construction and Operations
A wise asset owner builds on solid ground. Unless ground risks are clearly identified, projects can easily be delayed or delivered over budget. Some r...
#357b Well-Grounded Decisions: Design Development
Without a clear understanding of ground conditions, unquantified risk can be transferred from project owner to lead contractors when a contract is sig...
#357a Well-Grounded Decisions: Site Selection
On any project, uncertainty creates risk. Decisions that are made without a good understanding of site conditions can result in overengineering or thr...
#356 Making Space for Wastewater Treatment
Wastewater treatment is an overlooked lifesaver. While the medical advances of the last 100 years—penicillin, chemotherapy, and, more recently, mRNA v...
#355 The Real Value of Nature
Green-grey engineering combines nature-based solutions with traditional civil engineering. It can be used in flood protection, with mangroves acting a...
#354 AI in Infrastructure: Adoption and Guardrails
The infrastructure sector is adopting AI with enthusiasm. A new whitepaper from Bentley Systems, Pinsent Masons, Turner & Townsend, and Mott MacDonald...
#353 Carbon Assessment in a Time of Housebuilding
This week, the UK House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, or EAC, released a report on environmental sustainability and housing growth. The UK...
#352 Health Monitoring for Offshore Wind
From blood pressure monitors and smart watches, to MRIs and step counters, many of us make tracking health metrics part of our daily routine. Armed wi...
#351 Rough Seas and Reliable Defence Partnerships
Around the world, climate change and shifting alliances are opening up new theatres of geopolitical competition. In the Arctic, Canada must be ready t...
#350 Living in Space: The Next Generation of Astronauts
Dr Meganne Christian is a scientist and adventurer. In her research, she has studied the performance of novel materials including the use of nanoscale...
#349 Never Again: Embedding Safety in Engineering
The tragic fire at Grenfell Tower in west London demanded new ways of thinking about professionalism and ethics in the engineering sector. However, si...
#348 Modelling Distributed Energy Storage
In Europe, and around the world, renewable electricity generation is being built at pace. However, these sources of energy create a new challenge: the...
#347 The pipeline to Net Zero, revisited
Last week, at the end of September 2025, a study by Regen, commissioned by the MCS Foundation, found that biomethane had a limited capacity to replace...
#346 Scaling Carbon-Free Cement
It’s a simple fact of chemistry that cement cannot be produced, without also producing carbon dioxide. But this does not mean that the sector—and its...
#345 Pinpoint Precision in Space Positioning
When launching a satellite into orbit, getting the positioning right is of paramount importance. As humanity sends more satellites into space, the vas...
#344 Networks Under Water: Transport, Flooding and Resilience
When flooding happens, damage and disruption ripples out across assets and infrastructure. Private businesses and homeowners can insure themselves aga...
#343 Weaving Software into Automation
Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented the punch card as a means of inputting control data to one of the earliest automated technologies, the weavers’ loom. A...
#342 Real Solutions and the Industrial Metaverse
The metaverse is often thought of as an alternative virtual space, a world separate from reality where we can hang out with avatars of our friends and...
#341 Opening the Door to Engineering – Engineering Matters Awards winner’s episode
Alan Lusty founded adi Group, a multidisciplinary engineering business supporting major manufacturers. He is part of a group that offers engineering s...
#340 Diving Deep into Electric Machinery
Electrification of construction equipment is an ongoing and necessary part of the global effort to reduce carbon emissions and restrict global warming...
#339 Integrated Contracts and Innovative Delivery
On two major road projects in the UK work was completed on time and under budget. But not every project can claim such success. Defects, delays and co...
#338 Bio-Inspired Innovation & Systemic Sustainability
Nature has long served as a blueprint for engineering breakthroughs from the kingfisher-inspired design of Japan’s Bullet Train to termite mounds that...
#337 Breaking Barriers to STEM with Lightyear Foundation – Engineering Matters Awards winners episode
In this episode, we spotlight the remarkable work of the Lightyear Foundation, the winner of the Engineering Matters Awards 2025 Gold Champion for Div...
#336 Gravity-Powered Heavy Haul – Engineering Matters Awards winners episode
At a quarry in Turkey, heavy haul trucks are carrying hundreds of tonnes of materials, with no external power. It’s not quite perpetual motion, but it...
#335 Monitoring Methane: The Tech Behind the Tech
LongPath Technologies has taken Nobel-winning discoveries, and applied them to a key cause of climate change: methane leaks from oil and gas facilitie...
#334 Digital Construction’s Past, Present and Future
In 2016 management consultants McKinsey released a report that reverberated around the construction and engineering sectors. This sector, the report s...
#333 Agents of Change – AI in Industry
Generative AI has swept across our society. In every app, up it pops, eager to offer a helping hand. The opportunity to talk to computer systems as if...