Engineering News

Most of the attention in the oil and gas industry has been focused on the U.S. in the past few years, for understandable reasons. Some impressive engineering innovations promise to make the country the largest oil producer by the end of the decade, and it remains the largest consumer of the energy commodity in the world by a wide margin.

Effective application of the piezoelectric effect found in certain crystals could allow engineering researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology to create a highly sensitive new form of tactile sensor.

As money pours into the renewable energy industry, engineering research and development has managed to dramatically increase the efficiency of technologies like solar photovoltaics. MIT's Technology Review, however, reports that one group of researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory expressed worry that these technologies are not sufficiently advanced to help reduce carbon emissions in the short term.

Researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln could have found an innovative engineering solution to one of the trickier problems in materials science - making a structural fiber that is both strong enough to bear heavy loads and tough enough not to break under duress.

A new report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration suggests that the U.S. is likely to see natural gas power plants gain on coal-fired generation over the coming decades.

Even as the U.S. and countries around the world are looking into ever deeper and more difficult oil reserves, engineering research is trying to find ways to replace oil entirely. A group of scientists at the University of Exeter in England believe they might have taken a critical step along the road.

As much as world leaders and many environmental advocates have been pushing for broader adoption of renewable energy in recent years, many critics still argue that the technologies are simply too expensive at current prices to compete on their own merits with coal and natural gas. They suggest that further engineering research and development is needed in order to bring the technologies up to a competitive level.

Mars has always held a prominent place in the world of science fiction, with countless missions to go explore the desolate planet and more than a few chances for Martians to repay the favor. But now one group is hoping to make these hopeful dreams a reality, without any further great engineering innovations, and applications for the program are open and accepting.

A new heating system being developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the automaker Ford could bring a critical engineering innovation to the market for electric vehicles, according to MIT's Technology Review.

The U.S. has seen somewhat of a revival in its manufacturing sector in recent years, thanks to rising costs abroad as well as the increasing technical requirements of many manufacturing processes. But Scientific American notes that if the country is going to reemerge as a dominant manufacturing power, its industries will need to find a way to implement one of the more significant engineering innovations in recent years - additive manufacturing.