Here are the ten revolutionary approaches to traditional engineering
By Dr Aloknath De
‘Smart engineering' is all about using insights to conceive, model and scale an appropriate solution to a problem or an objective. Scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge is applied in the process. This knowledge serves as an engine behind designing, building and maintaining structures, machines, systems, materials and even processes.
Need-of-the-hour engineering:
In the Before Christ period, people focused on primitive technology for agriculture - studying soil characterisation, improving irrigation system, and finding means of ploughing land for harvesting. As civilisation moved from the Stone Age to the Metal Age, the society learnt to cook and prepare food. Agriculture to heavy engineering to electronics engineering - various themes have got emphasis during India's series of five-year plans. Today's ‘need-of-the hour engineering' is towards a wide deployment of broadband and connectivity, and an optimisation of required infrastructure.
Improvised engineering:
I call the second lever of smart engineering as ‘improvised engineering'. This deals with how the same or similar purpose is achieved by more sophisticated technology. For example, in the early days, the shadow from an anchored stick used to give relative time-of-the-day. Currently, we have watches of all types including high-precision instruments that capture the split-second difference between winner and runner-ups in the Olympics 100-meter race. Smartphones have not only enriched voice communication, but also eased file-sharing and multimedia data transfer.
Strip-down engineering:
Curiosity about what goes into a product design gets satiated to a great extent by reverse engineering. How many people have tried to unravel Coke's signature formula? We also hear about frugal engineering, which drives down the cost factor but at times fails to maintain the durability of the product. ‘Strip-down engineering' combines the strengths of reverse engineering and frugal engineering. The engineering smartness here is built around applying Pareto's 80:20 principle and analysing how to keep essential functionalities. The goal is to select the top 80 per cent features from a user perspective and implement them with 80 per cent cost reduction.
Performance-boosting engineering:
The success of a product or service lies in its performance by relative as well as absolute measures. ‘Performance-boosting engineering' seeks to enhance performance by keeping constraints in mind. Let us take the example of the mobile phone where we currently leverage the octa-core processor. The evolution from single-core to octa-core has enabled us to incorporate parallelisation and increase processing power. In a heterogeneous processing environment, appropriate partitioning of code across ASIC, DSP, CPU, GPU, and MCU chips significantly drive up system performance. This category of smart engineering also encompasses developing multi-resolution systems, such as a spectrum of products from phone-with-full-connectivity-but-basic-camera to higher-resolution-camera-but-basic-phone-connectivity. This class of smart engineering facilitates introduction of more complex features, reduces response time or boosts other system performance metrics.
IntelliSys engineering:
‘IntelliSys engineering' empowers intelligent systems, promotes autonomous operation based on closed-loop control, energy efficiency and networking capabilities for a platform or a system to be intelligent. IntelliSys engineering for connected cars enables us to build cars that aid in navigation, cars that can go driverless, cars that talk to each other by wi-fi technology and cars that will even fly!
Cross-pollination engineering:
Studying a single field dries up one's ideas! Newer fields are emerging. And solutions for some problems require extensive knowledge of multiple faculties - either to tie ideas up, or learn from one field and apply to another. This is what I term as ‘cross-pollination engineering'. For example, knowledge of geology and soil engineering combined with biology helps to address problems pertaining to geo-microbiology. This helps us understand how bacteria and viruses come to our food through soil contamination and what possible remedies could be taken up. Geography knowledge in conjunction with information system expertise paves the way for geo-information system (GIS). Cross-pollination engineering gives birth to new fields like fiber optic communication that combines optical physics with telecommunication. The field of music, coupled with acoustics engineering, opens a chapter of musicology by cross-pollination of subtleties in both fields.
Smart-auxiliary engineering:
At times, engineering plays second fiddle to scientific projects - it helps in next-level of scientific discoveries through infrastructural support. Let us consider the lLarge hadron collider mega project recently conducted in CERN, Geneva. The very simulation of the Big Bang has been an engineering feat - this has been a pre-requisite to determine what happens after the big bang event. The support role of engineering should not be misconstrued as engineering trivia. One mouse can bother an elephant! One bird can hit a plane and knock it down.
Sustainable engineering:
‘Sustainable engineering' encourages us to build products that consume less energy and cause least damage to the environment. Let us take the example of electronic circuitry. Researchers have progressed to operate digital chipsets in 1.8V instead of 3V or 5V. Energy-aware protocols have also been designed. These techniques substantially help in overall power reduction for electronics equipments. Sustainable engineering addresses concerns around energy consumption, electro-magnetic radiation hazards produced by cell towers and so on. How to reduce contamination and even re-purify natural resources for our well-being is the concept behind sustainable engineering that impacts the product design phase.
Nature-inspired engineering:
City parks often have bushes that are shaped like animals. We can also design usable products inspired by flora and fauna. Cranes are built mimicking a long-necked giraffe. Look at our national flower lotus. The lotus leaves manage to remain free of contaminants as they possess a field of small bumps and dust is easily picked up by water drops. Nature-inspired engineers study objects and phenomena from nature to understand how a fundamental scientific principle works in daily life and apply the notions in product design.
Forward-looking engineering:
Engineering foundations that are based on strong theory and driven by science can be quite forward-looking. Information theory, game theory, number theory and string theory have all been playing roles in telecommunication, cryptography and other associated areas. Technology is moving from virtual reality to augmented reality. User interactions are changing from touch-base to gesture-controlled. Integration of audio, visual and haptic feedback is becoming a part of next user interaction. Quantum computing uses qubits with superposition and entanglement. Using these basic principles, quantum teleportation allows the same entity to be in two places simultaneously, but observation decoheres. Forward-looking engineering aims to manifest scientific ideas or even science fiction concepts to reality.
The writer is senior VP and CTO, Samsung India – Bangalore
