Five Engineering Marvels That Have Changed The World Since 2000
There have been significant advancements in many of the engineering fields during the past dozen years. In each case, engineers in the respective field tout the advances as highly significant accomplishments. Narrowing the field to only five developments is a difficult and subjective task. Advances selected for this article were viewed in the light of the associated discipline and also in the light of their effect upon other disciplines.
3-D Printers
When considered in this way, the single most significant advancement in any field over the last 12 years must certainly be the development of 3-D printing.
In conventional manufacturing processes, individual components are created and then assembled. Individual gears are physically meshed together and placed into a gearbox. Components of a motor are assembled and connected with wires. Engines are bolted to vehicle frames. Each component of the final product is created in a separate process. It would be impractical to build only one gear at a time, so excess gears are produced and stored for future use. Producing a single toaster is therefore much more expensive, on a cost per finished good basis, than the production of thousands of toasters.
The additive manufacturing process, which is often called 3-D printing, is a radically different concept. Entire products are manufactured by the deposition of thin layers of the item, as if a toaster had been sliced into hundreds of horizontal layers. The housing, the frame, the wiring, and the resistive heaters are all deposited together, layer by layer, until the finished toaster is created. This technology eliminates the need for the production and storage of separate components. Manufacturing blueprints become a single set of coded instructions that are executed by a print head. Items can even be produced at the point of use. Instead of going out to buy a toaster, consumers will soon be able to download a toaster and print it in their home.
Printers are now available that can be assembled from components created entirely by another 3-D printer. The technology is almost self-replicating. In addition to the dramatic changes this technology brings to the way goods or prototypes are designed and manufactured, 3-D printing also holds tremendous promise for the future of orbital space stations or other extraterrestrial structures. Construction goods could be printed as needed in orbit or on the moon. Only raw materials and a single 3-D printer would need to be lifted into orbit. New designs could be introduced simply by uploading a new print program to the printer hardware.
The term 3-D printing originated with the adaptation of ink jet technology by engineers at MIT in 1993. The technology was available to consumers by the early 2000s, but it was quite expensive. In 2006, two open source 3-D printing projects were released to the public, and personal 3-D printers can now be created for around $500 each.
Coding Of The Human Genome
Another world-changing engineering feat occurred in 2001, when biomedical engineers published the complete sequence of the human genome. This information, and the techniques used to obtain it, makes it possible to design unique treatments for genetic disorders. Pharmaceutical companies already use DNA microarrays to simultaneously analyze thousands of gene expression profiles in the development of new drugs.
When the Human Genome Project was first published, the authors predicted that the work would have “profound long-term consequences for medicine, leading to the elucidation of the underlying molecular mechanisms of disease and thereby facilitating the design … of rational diagnostics and therapeutics targeted at those mechanisms.”
This has certainly been the case. Gene therapy treatments are currently available for severe combined immunodeficiency, one congenital form of blindness, and color blindness. Studies with animals have shown that altered genes are passed on to offspring.
Microbial Fuel Cells
Techniques used in the Human Genome Project have also been used to produce genetically modified seeds and grains, and genetically engineered foods already influence worldwide production. In 2007, it became clear that it could also impact wastewater disposal and energy production industries.
Microbial fuel cells are devices that convert chemical energy to electrical energy through the catalytic interaction of bacteria. These cells contain cathode and anode compartments that are separated by a membrane that allows only positively charged ions to pass. Bacteria oxidize fuel to product protons and electrons. The protons pass through the membrane to the cathode compartment, and the electrons pass through external circuits as current. When they reach the cathode compartment through the external circuit, they combine with the protons there to produce water.
MFC bacteria can oxidize many different pollutants as fuel. Because the end result is pure water, residential and industrial wastewater is an obvious target application.
The Large Hadron Collider
The epitome of electrical engineering feats over the past dozen years is undoubtedly the successful operation of the Large Hadron Collider in 2009. The high-energy accelerator was constructed from 1998 to 2008 through the collaborative efforts of more than 10,000 engineers and scientists from more than 100 countries and universities. In March of 2010, two 3.5 TeV proton beams were collided. This event was the most energetic man-made particle collision ever engineered.
The LHC is designed to answer fundamental questions about the basic interactions of particles and forces, the structure of space and time, and the quantum mechanical search for the elusive Higgs boson. It will undoubtedly reveal more about high-energy particle interactions in the future. It is one of the five most significant achievements in the past 12 years because it is capable of unique experiments that no other laboratory in the world can perform.
Bosons are named after the physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. While the LHC explores high energy particles, Bose–Einstein condensates exist at the opposite end of the energy spectrum. In 1920, Bose and Einstein predicted the existence of a state of matter beyond solid, liquid or gas. This state, which is called Bose-Einstein Condensate, is a dilute gas of weakly interacting bosons that are confined within an external energy potential and cooled as close as possible to absolute zero. When these conditions are reached, large percentages of the bosons are in their lowest quantum state. It is here that the quantum effects predicted by Einstein and others should become observable on a macroscopic scale. The first Bose-Einstein Condensate was produced experimentally in 1995 by Cornell and Weiman using rubidium gas.
In Bose-Einstein Condensates, because large groups of the bosons are in the lowest quantum state, groups of atoms begin to occupy the same space and behave as a single atom. These materials are unlike anything else known to materials science and offer unique properties to engineers in many fields. It will be some time before they show up in commercial applications, but even their creation in a laboratory setting is a stunning achievement. They are already being used by computer engineers to create entangled atoms, or qubits, to design computer technology that will soon change the world.
Quantum Computers
In 2009, researchers at Yale University created a two-qubit quantum processor. Qubits are units of quantum information that are analogous to bits in conventional computers. They are able to store information according to the additional dimensions called superpositions that are associated with the quantum properties of a physical atom. The additional dimension is quantum entanglement. In a qubit, entangled atoms are grouped together, and the information is stored according to the spin state and entanglement of the grouped atoms.
The Yale researchers were able to entangle a billion aluminum atoms in such a way that they acted like a single atom in two different energy states. This resulted in a two-qubit superconducting chip that was able to run several elementary algorithms. Researchers at the University of Bristol were able to achieve similar results with a silicon-based quantum computing chip.
In 2011, the D-Wave One Adiabatic Quantum Computer became commercially available. The D-Wave one purportedly uses a 128-qubit processor chipset. These computers will not be available to the average consumer for some time, but the impact they will have will be phenomenal. Devices will be much smaller and fast than anything available now. IBM announced in February of 2012 that the company had made several significant breakthroughs in quantum computing.
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