Question

Critically appraise the role of the professional engineer in addressing sustainable development in the short term (the next five to ten years) either for a field of engineering that you know well through your own experience or one of the following technologies:

i.wind power to replace up to 15% of fossil-fuel burning in the UK

ii.hydrogen fuel cells to replace fossil-fuel burning for road transport

iii.recycling of plastics and of glass

iv.mining and smelting of metal ores

v.mobile phones and their development.

Answer 1

Sustainability is the key to survival of future generations. Professional engineers have a lot of responsibility in playing a key role in achieving sustainability.

Firstly, they know the severity of the problems which the world faces today as they face these issues on a daily basis in their workplace. For instance take the case of pollution which is really troublesome in today's world. One important contributor is the gasoline vehicles which emit higher levels of NOX, SOX, other harmful greenhouse gases.

It is a big engineering challenge to develop new and less polluting engines possibly developing an emissionless engine. One such example is using an electric vehicle. No engines are required in this case. Engineers have to come out with out of the box solutions to create a sustainable electric vehicle architecture since charging time is a challenge in today's time constrained world. People cannot wait for long times to charge their vehicles. So it is important to develop a battery technology which gives large amounts of power and quicker charging time. Also is a question of recyclability of those batteries because presence of harmful metallic compounds if not treated correctly would pose a health hazard.

Both short term and long term goals have to be studied by any engineer before coming up with a proposal.