The Engineering Process

This past week I've gotten to look back at all the research I've done so far in order to outline my research paper, and it has made me think a lot about the engineering process in general. One of my projects this week was to create a timeline of ideas and achievements for the last three years of Senior Design Teams that have worked on a tracking system for the Golden Lion Tamarin (GLT). After hours of poring over their final papers and presentations, I did manage to consolidate their work into a single page of highlights, but rereading their work with the knowledge that I have now has only helped me get a better perspective on the sea otter problem.

Unfortunately, the time that I have to work on the sea otter problem is so short that I will not have time to build or buy any prototypes, and I don't have a budget anyways.  Therefore, all of my work and proposed solutions is theoretical, but that doesn't mean that I can't evaluate and analyze my own proposed systems to chose the option that is the most likely to succeed. This means that I will need to make some tables outlining the requirements for a successful sea otter tracking system, and another couple of tables that analyze the proposed systems and show which systems accomplish certain goals. These kinds of tables will look familiar to people who read Grant's blog and pretty much anyone who has done work as an engineer. Here's an example of a good table from this year's GLT group:

One of my goals for next week is to have a comprehensive list of all the requirements for a successful sea otter tracking system, which should be doable, but I doubt that I will be able to solidify the 2-4 proposed systems by next week, because it seems that the more I read and research, the more possibilities I find that I have to consider. For instance, just this week I realized that I should look into batteries that can be recharged by converting kinetic (moving) energy into chemical energy, because otters are constantly moving, and depending on where the transmitting device is on the otter, this could significantly increase the battery life of the transmitter. 

On a semi-unrelated note, another important aspect of engineering in general that I've come to learn is that engineering is extremely collaborative. Nearly every innovation nowadays is a result of somebody improving upon somebody else's work, so usually no one engineer really breaks away and invents something eons ahead of the standard technology. I know that if I were to sit in a room full of radio telemetry devices and a couple of books on the subject, I would not be able to come up with an innovative and new tracking device or system. However, since I am able to see the work of thousands of current engineers, biologists, and ecologists, I can see whose new work can best be implemented towards my possible solutions. This is a very exciting notion, that for any engineering project there are thousands of people out there whose work and research can be used to help you make your own contribution to solving a problem. 

Well, I get to go to an optical science lecture today, which I'm pretty excited about, so I'd better get going. Thanks for reading!