Engineering is a field where scientific and mathematical principles are applied practically to our daily life as to improve and provide us with better facilities and more comfortable surroundings to live with. However as the civilization grow, many environmental problems arise. Therefore, it is our duty to protect and preserve our environment from over-exploited meanwhile exalting the quality of our life. Among all the 14 grand challenges for engineering as discussed in the two articles, the idea of capturing and converting the solar energy arouse my enthusiasm for it. As most of our energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels and now seeing that this kind of source is running low as compared to the growing energy demand, it is crucial to find an ideal environmental-friendly energy that can replace fossil fuels. However, it is really a tough task, since that until now this type of energy can only cover a very limited demand from the societies. For example, the efficiency of converting solar energy into electricity is still very disappointed especially when compared to the high production cost. More ironically, the sun provides energy that is thousand times more than our total energy consumption every day, but until now we can only benefits very little of energy from it. It is definitely hard to incept much energy from the sun as it is spread throughout the earth surface and thus if we are to set up solar energy system, it is necessary to take up a wide area as to receive more sunlight. Besides that, we need an ideal material that can receive, store, and convert the sunlight to electricity effectively. However these two conditions are hard to achieve because it consumes a huge amount of fund. Well, here comes the role of the engineers, it’s their honor mission to find a more economical way to generate huge amount of electricity to replace the exhausting fossil fuels. Perhaps investigate some methods that are able to attract and absorb sunlight radiation from the surrounding area? Hence, I think this is very challenging and crucial to the profession as a lot of researches and efforts are needed to accomplish this mission.
adapted from
National Academy of Engineering,Introduction to the Grand Challenges for Engineering
