FACULTY OF ENGINEERING AND GREEN TECHNOLOGY

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING

UGEA3243 ENGINEERS IN SOCIETY
ASSIGNEMENT REPORT

The Challenges for Engineering beyond 2020

Prepared By:
Name
Cheong Kah Chon
Chong Mun Kean
Fong Wen Kai
Wong Yau Yun
Yu Wei Seng

Lecturer in charge:
Ir.K.Chandrasekaran a/l Krishnan
Ir. Chan Cheong Loong
Print Date:
20 March 2015

Student ID.
11AGB03476
11AGB03413
11AGB04037
11AGB03529
11AGB04299

Throughout human history, engineering has driven the advance of civilization. Beyond 2020, as the population
grows, the needs and desires expand, problem of sustaining civilizations continuing advancement without harming
the environment, while still improving the quality of life would be the grand challenges for engineering.
Shortage of Fresh, Clean Water for Human Survival
Nowadays, lack of clean water and basic sanitation are critical problems in many regions of the world. More
than a billion of people worldwide lack access to improved water and nearly 5,000 children worldwide die each day
due to diarrhea diseases (Atkins R., 2008). For a sustainable and healthy future for the planet, developing methods of
ensuring sufficient clean water supplies pose engineering challenges of the first magnitude.
Desalination is the technology of extracting the salt from seawater. However, it is expensive to build a
desalination plant and lots of energy is required to operate it. Thus, desalination technology is suitable mainly for
seaside rich countries. Developing new technologies that would lower energy use and operation costs are important
in order to help the desalination development for impoverished countries.
The technological approaches to the water availability and safety are not only involves the development of
technologies to improve recycling of wastewater and sewage treatment, but also involves developing strategies for
reducing water use. Besides, another strategy is to produce inexpensive distillation units to rural and low-income
areas places where water distribution problems are severed. These challenges must be faced through sustainable
ways and foreseeing the water demand that the ever-growing population will require for its survival.
Make solar energy economical
The growing of economic and population have been accelerating worldwide energy consumption over the last
decade. Supplement of non-renewable energy sources such as oil and gas will not sufficient for the rapid rise in
energy demands. For a long-term, renewable energy source such as solar power offers an attractive alternative.
However, solar energy potential remains untapped for certain countries. It is a great engineering challenge to make
solar energy economical.
The key issue is material purity. Current solar cell designs require high purity material to avoid impurities
block the flow of electric charge (Djekic M., 2014). Pure materials are cost expensive and therefore increase the
fabrication costs. Discovering and developing other new materials for solar cells may help in reducing the fabrication
costs and generating electricity efficiently.

Another huge barrier faced in solar energy is the need of solar energy storage. Solar energy need to be
captured and stored for use during the nighttime and cloudy weather. New materials could greatly improve the
effectiveness of capacitors, superconducting magnets, or flywheels, all of which could provide convenient power
storage in many applications. Nowadays, it is important to improve solar cells, reduce their costs, and provide
efficient ways to use their electricity to create storable fuel.
Energy Generation through Fusion and Fission of Nuclear
In this modern era, we have a lot of ways to generated energy for our daily usages. It can be categorized into two
major types, which are renewable source and non-renewable sources. One of the energy resources has argument
when categorizing, which is nuclear energy. We cannot deny that it is a highly efficient energy sources compare to
other energy sources. Nuclear energy is a newer energy resource, which only started to supply energy in 1954. The
methodology of nuclear power is using fission of radioactive elements collide with each other to produce heat
energy. There are some disadvantages by using this energy resource to generate energy. First is the power plant will
produce a lot of heat, it needs to build besides river or sea to maintain the temperature to avoid overheat. Besides, the
plant will have leakage of radioactive substances if there is a crack at the storages or fission chamber. It is very
harmful to human and the environment around the power plant. There is an example of radioactive substances
leakage which happened in 2011, in Fukushima, Japan. A major earthquake and a 15-metre tsunami disabled the
power supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors (World Nuclear Association, 2015). In this incident,
the high radioactive was released to environment over 4 to 6 days. This is a serious pollution to the environment and
human being. Besides, the waste of the reaction is also a radioactive residue. It cannot be disposed and have to store
at individual reactors over 430 locations worldwide. The fission of nuclear energy is uncontrollable, danger to
human, and the wastes will pollute our environment. These are the problems that need to be solved by engineers in
future.
Because of the fission of nuclear is hardly to control, engineers found that the fusion of nuclear also can be
used as an energy source. Like what happening on the Sun, fusion is the source of energy on it. Because of the
differences of temperature and pressure, it is hard to achieve fusion of nuclear on the earth compare to on the sun.
But with the advance of the technology, human-engineered fusion has been demonstrated by using a smaller scale.
The challenge of this method of energy collection is to scale up and make it become commercial. Literally, from the

research done by engineers and scientist, the nuclear fusion is safer than the nuclear fission. This is because the
fusion process can be immediately stopped by remove the fuel supply to the fusion chamber. The prototype was
further improved by decrease the order of magnitude of the raw materials, and this will cause the radioactivity of the
process decreases. Unfortunately, the waste of the process still unable to dispose and this still cause the pollution
issue in future. The major challenge in this method is to increase the reliability and stability of the energy conversion
so that it can benefit to us and also environment.
Restoring and Improvement of Infrastructure
Infrastructures are the basic structures that support human life. It ranges from water and sewer system to road and
power generation system. The increases in population, natural disaster and accident have affected the restoring and
improvement of the infrastructure badly. The challenges that engineer will face beyond 2020 is how to provide the
infrastructure to the society more economically and environmental friendly. One of the reason is most of the
infrastructure is buried in the ground. This creates a lot of problems in maintaining and upgrading because the
location of all the underground pipes and cable cannot be labeled and mapping.
Another problem in infrastructure is transportation. The challenges for engineering in transportation is
engineering integrated transportation system that make individual transport such as bicycling and walking become
more convenient and safety. If this challenge can be solved, the number of vehicles on the road, traffic jams and
pollution can be greatly reduced. Long time needed for construction of infrastructure is also a major challenge in
restoring the infrastructure. To overcome the problems, new construction methods should be applied to repairing and
improving the quality of infrastructure. Advance in technologies such as robotic much be used in construction to
speed up construction time in lower costs. Moreover, rebuilding of infrastructure faced problems due to policies and
politics problems. Funding for infrastructure is also a big problem faced by engineer beyond 2020 too.
Enhancing of Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality is a computer stimulated environment that can stimulate physical presence in place of real or
imagined world. Virtual reality has become a powerful training tool for training purpose in educational field.
Besides that, growing in technologies of virtual reality also create various form of entertainment. For virtual reality
to fully stimulate a reality situation, several engineering challenges must be overcome. The first problem faces is the

difficult in reproducing sensation of sound, touch and motion. The field of view must be in high resolution together
with fast refresh updates rate needed to create the illusion of real scene.
The next challenge in virtual reality is placing of reality virtual people to interact with the user. This is
because fine details of the virtual environment cannot be produced precisely. Besides that, real time computer
graphics is not capable to create a virtual human that can interact with a real person. For example, generation of
meaningful sentences, emotion and muscle movement is hard to create using the real time technologies. Moreover,
touch is a critical challenge in virtual reality field. In some reality devices, the gloves contains sensor that record
movement of user hand movement and provide the feedback. However, the feedback is not real enough and is not
good enough to be applied in training sector. As an example, the feel of cutting a virtual tissue has certain degree of
different compare with cutting a real muscle tissue. In conclusion, there is still a lot of challenges face in virtual
reality field and it is very difficulties to improve the quality of virtual reality using the present technologies.
Health Informatics
Health informatics is outcome from combination of information science, computer science, and health care.
It is dealing with the resources, devices, and methods required in optimizing the retrieval, storage, acquisition, and
use of information in health and biomedicine. It will be a tough challenge to invent a health information system that
able sharing data and medical records for individual patients and disease outbreaks among governments and
international health organizations, care practices and integrate local, regional, national, and global health informatics
networks. It is required to be able to provide the medical details of anyone quickly and securely.
One of problems is to redesign health information system as the medical data may lose away or display in
messy way when share with other hospital. This is due to different documentation software as well for the acquisition
software they used to collect and keep the data. Without these accurate medical records, hospital will not able to
provide the best treatment for patient. Besides that, another problem discovers in designing the system is the
document storage overloaded due to redundant medical records and information. When the data was collected
without filtering and sorting for a long period, doctors will suffer to find out the cases that relevant to the same
diseases. In order to solve these problems, health information systems should designed in a way that can share data
quickly and seamless through the networking, manage to collect the latest authorized medical records and able to
store it securely from stealing by criminal. Moreover, the systems must be able to identify the cases accurate as

possible, show the related message in standard way with providing some proper solution to treat the diseases. In
conclusion, a powerful and global health informatics networks and system can extremely improve and increase the
efficiency and quality of medical aid and care and also the response to widespread public health emergencies.
Reverse Engineer on Brain
It is a challenge for engineering in inventing a thinking machine which machine itself are powerful enough
to emulate the human intelligence. The main objective of reverse-engineering the brain is to investigate more about
the brain structure and how it work, so that can integrating into the artificial machines and make them capable to do
decision-making. For an instance, by reverse-engineering on mobile phone, engineers are able to retrieve the
technology pattern from the mobile phone and do analyze on how it work such as response to user immediately when
user press on the screen, how to handle the error and so forth. Besides, it help in developing a new phone quickly just
by integrating the new features with current one without re-implementing. It will be interesting that if engineers are
able to apply reverse-engineering skill to human brain. By doing so, they are able to create a machine where it can
has its own mind to decide like what normal human will do. It is also known as Artificial Intelligence.
If these attributes integrate into machines, electronics devices will be able to executing the job without
waiting commands from user and complete it with the best result in any situation. However, this will be critical
challenges for engineer to apply reverse-engineering skill on the human brain to achieve the purpose. One of the
challenges is the difficulty for engineer to gain the working pattern on how brain doing job or making decision to
create this simulation activities for brain as different brain can have different pattern of thinking when solving same
problem. The other problem faced by engineers is they have not find out yet the appropriate ways or devices to keep
track the signal information that travelling in and out of the brain. Some more the transmitting signal speed may
varies due to different conditions and these signals need to be decoded to retrieve message. In conclusion, it will be
great challenges for engineering to analyze the kinetics, feedback loops, nerve pathways and complexities of nerve
cell signals information. Much more powerful computing machines can be created when the engineers can overcome
these challenges and replicate nerve cells ability to various level of excitation.
Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods
At the present time, global warming had been a hot issue among the people. As one of the primary factor
that contributes to global warming is the growth in emissions of carbon dioxide. Research showed that in every

million molecules of air in our daily life contained about 380 molecules of carbon dioxide. Although the amount of
carbon dioxide may not look like much but the average global temperature has started to rise due to its extensive
heat-trapping power. If carbon dioxide levels continue increasing, further warming could have led to terrible
consequences. A great challenge for the engineers beyond 2020 will be developing a system for carbon sequestration.
Carbon sequestration is a technology capturing the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels and
storing it safely away from the atmosphere (Central Texas Discover Engineering, 2015). Carbon dioxide capture and
sequestration could play an important role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions while enabling low-carbon
electricity generate from power plants. It could also be used to reduce unwanted gas emissions from industrial
process such as cement production and natural gas processing facilities (United States Environmental Protection
Agency, 2013).
This method can be done by first capture the carbon dioxide emitted from power plants or industrial
processes through some chemical system. The carbon dioxide captured was then compressed and transport to some
kind of injection well and stored deep into underground through geologic sequestration method. Extra cautions and
attentions should be pay during the selection of potential sequestration sites to ensure that the site can safely and
securely store the carbon dioxide. Possible choices of sequestration places are old gas and oil fields as the carbon
dioxide injected will interacts with the remaining oil to make them easier to remove. However the problem is that
these gas and oil field do not have enough capacity to store the massive amount of carbon dioxide that will be
eventually sequestered. So far the ideal solution would be using the sedimentary rock formations containing salty
water (brine) which can prevent the upward migration of carbon dioxide but the concern remains whether they will
be secure enough to store carbon dioxide for centuries (Atkins R., 2008). Thus, it will be an engineering challenge to
choose and design the storage sites carefully.

References
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Central Texas - Discover Engineering, (2015). Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods. [online]
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Djekic, M. (2014). Grand Engineering Challenge Economical Solar Energy. [online]

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Epa - United States Environmental Protection Agency, (2013). Carbon Dioxide Capture and
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