• Question: Have you every had a fail with a project you did before, what was it.

    Asked by ALC to Ashley, Catherine, John G, Laura, Ray on 11 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Laura Tobin

      Laura Tobin answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      I’ve had lots of fails with projects. It’s mostly trial and error. For example we theoretically modelled the response of LED lights on a maths simulation program. We both LEDs in different colours to see if the experimental results matched those on the simulation. It didn’t. Not every LED is the same and they can slight vary (they don’t all have exactly the same wavelength) and we couldn’t get the right shade of blue we needed. It didn’t seem like an issue at the time but none of the LED manufacturers made the right colour of blue we needed. So we compromised. Also we knew the LEDs got very hot, but they got so hot that they kept blowing and we couldn’t continue with the experiment until we made special cooling boards for them. It seemed every time we solved one problem, an another problem took its place.

    • Photo: Catherine Conaghan

      Catherine Conaghan answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Lots of fails 🙂 But that just means to try and do the same thing another way, or change what the final outcome will be because of what you have learned. Engineering involves a lot or trail and error as Laura has said as well!

    • Photo: John Ging

      John Ging answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Not so much fail in terms of the engineering, but in terms of the bureaucracy, then yes. There’s a lot more to engineering than just studies and results. Explaining it to people and getting them happy with the outcome is the hard part. A failure from my point of view is when customers don’t understand the work and what it means. I recently gave a customer some news that they need a filter to protect their equipment. They didn’t like that as it costs a lot of money.

    • Photo: Ashley Culbert

      Ashley Culbert answered on 16 Nov 2014:

      Not as such. I carryout a site selection project prior to starting. The site selection project helps us to identify the constraints on all the sites this helps us to select the best site for the project.

    • Photo: Ray Alcorn

      Ray Alcorn answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Oh yes.. A wave energy device I was on started sinking. We managed to mostly rescue it but were compromised from that moment on. It did though mean we had to be very innovate as to how to deploy and prove a structure that was damaged.

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