Engineering Matters

In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy turned sharply west and drove a storm surge into New York Harbor. Lower Manhattan flooded, a substation failed leaving more than 220,000 people without power, and damage across the wider region reached $65–70 billion.

Protecting the Lower East Side from the next storm means threading flood walls, berms and deployable gates through one of the densest parts of the city. Defences sit above generations of utilities: sewers, water mains, power and telecommunications infrastructure. Works also had to avoid separating communities, while ensuring access to city parks and the waterfront.

Engineering capacity is stretched by modern demands, and extreme weather poses increasing risks. Engineers need new approaches that enable them to evaluate and test more options, more quickly and effectively than ever before. Artificial intelligence, digital twins, and open data approaches provide the tools to do just that.

These technologies can reduce tasks such as floodgate analysis from 30 hours to just 30 minutes. Across the infrastructure lifecycle, digital advancements are boosting efficiency and improving outcomes, transforming once cost-prohibitive concepts into the resilient infrastructure systems that society depends on.

Guests

Roni Deitz, Global Director for Climate Adaptation, Arcadis

Gregg Herrin, Vice President for Water, Bentley Systems

Resources

To read more about the East Side Coastal Resiliency project, click here

Watch the floodgates in action here

Partner

Around the world, infrastructure professionals rely on software from Bentley Systems to help them design, build, and operate better and more resilient infrastructure for transportation, water, energy, cities, and more. Founded in 1984 by engineers for engineers, Bentley is the partner of choice for engineering firms and owner-operators worldwide, with software that spans engineering disciplines, industry sectors, and all phases of the infrastructure lifecycle.

In this episode, we celebrate Showerkap, winner of the Innovation Champion category in the Engineering Matters Awards 2026. The final award of the series. Judged by representatives from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and Engineers Without Borders UK, the award recognises innovation across all of this year’s categories.

Showerkap won gold for technology designed to reduce the water and energy wasted in showers. Its system uses sensors to monitor showers at fixture level, helping building operators understand water use and spot maintenance problems. Its patented valve technology can also encourage people to take shorter showers by gradually reducing the flow of water, rather than imposing a fixed limit.

We learn about how the technology works and the role small changes in behaviour could play in tackling water waste.

Guest

Carly Hunt, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Board Member, Showerkap

In this Engineering Matters Awards episode, we celebrate the winner of the Net Zero Champion category, which recognises projects, processes, and tools that make a real contribution to reducing carbon emissions. The highest awards were to be given to those entries that demonstrate significant impact or widespread scope, or that overcome a specific challenge.

Our gold-level award-winning entrant was Ceres Power for its solid oxide technology, which can generate electricity with high efficiency while avoiding the combustion and associated emissions of conventional power generation. We explore how Ceres’ technology could help meet rapidly growing electricity demand, including from data centres, while supporting the transition to a lower-carbon energy system.

Guest

Nick Lawrence, Chief Product Officer, Ceres Power

Resources

For McKinsey’s report, Global Energy Perspective 2025, click here

For more information about the Ceres Endura and more from Ceres Power, click here

Returning to the Moon is the next step, but staying there is the next leap. Abrasive and electrostatically-charged dust particles cling to every surface, and find their way into every mechanism, while a radiation-blasted lunar surface swings from 130°C in the sun to a brisk -173°C in the shade.

To survive and thrive in the lunar wasteland, we will need habitat modules, power plants, autonomous rovers, drilling equipment and more: a fleet of machinery that needs to survive these hostile conditions.

How we design these machines will be critical, how lubricants behave in extreme temperatures and hard vacuum is yet to be determined. But engineers are beginning to answer some of these questions.

Guest

Chris Lockett, Chief Technology Officer, Castrol

Resources

To watch the Drive Me to the Moon documentary, click here

To listen to the Engineering Matters episode on in-situ space resource utilisation, click here

In this Engineering Matters Awards episode, we celebrate the winner of the Sustainability Champion category, which recognises organisations driving groundbreaking innovation to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It promotes the conservation of natural resources, reduces waste and pollution, and supports social and economic stability.

Our award-winning entrant is the Nuclear Manufacturing Group at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), whose team partnered with Cambridge Vacuum Engineering and Kairos Power to pioneer electron beam welding for Small Modular Reactor (SMR) vessels. Their breakthrough reduces vessel welding times from 500 hours down to just five hours, eliminates hundreds of kilograms of filler wire, and dramatically cuts manufacturing energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Guest

Charles Carpenter, Head of Research for the Nuclear Manufacturing Group, University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre

Resources

To read more about the project discussed in this episode, read the Kairos Power Report