Mechanical Engineering

Mechanical engineer Madiha Kotb describes her calling as "engineers do fix things". Life-saving equipment found in hospitals is designed and maintained by engineers. Society takes engineering achievements for granted, even though they are essential and everywhere in every-day life: from plumbing fixtures to electricity to the buildings that we live in. "Unfortunately", she says, "engineers did not used to be good communicators" – though initiatives like the oral history project are changing this.

Dr. David Weaver describes his 16 years of retirement as "travelling around the world solving big problems". Always an avid modeler, one of his first initiatives as a new professor at McMaster University was to build a model of Cape Breton Island control structures for the hydro-electric power stations. He used the model to identify and resolve potential problems converting Megawatts of water power into electricity, and as a tool to design the various components. The work, when published, was used globally to design these control structures.

Mechanical engineer Dr. Martin Fandrich describes one of his design-build projects – a boat lift. The lift reaches under the water surface to pick up the boat and rotates it to the left or right for a forklift to take it to dry storage. The owner of a boat that was at the limit of the lift's capacity offered his vessel for a load test. Dr. Fandrich recalls "I am not a mariner – but it was a very expensive-looking boat!" Fortunately, the new lift functioned perfectly

Madiha Kotb's fifth grade teacher noted her "talent in math" and that, plus marking her 16th birthday with Niel Armstrong's moon walk, led to her decision to choose a career in engineering. She started the materials engineering program at the American University in Cairo, but with the unexpected passing of her father, she and her husband moved to Canada, and she completed her degree at Loyola in Montreal in 1976. After a couple of years in Nigeria, she returned to Canada to do a Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering, and took a job with the Quebec Department of Labour to develop regulations and standards for boilers and pressure vessels. She became a member of the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors and related technical committees of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Eventually she became Chief Boiler Inspector for Quebec. She became Vice President of Conformity Assessment for ASME, then a member of the ASME Board of Governors, and, finally, served as the 132nd President of ASME. She was also aligned with nuclear power initiatives, seeing the construction, commissioning, and eventual decommissioning of the Gentilly 2 nuclear power plant. In retirement, she has worked as a consultant and written a chapter of the book "Daughters of the Nile, Egyptian Women Changing Their World", intended to inspire female students.

Dr. David Weaver describes his youthful interest in gasoline-engine powered go-karts, home-built radios, servicing cars, and how this led him to study mechanical engineering. He left his first job with the Ford Motor Company in Oakville to return to university for a Master's degree on satellites for Spar Aerospace and then a PhD in mathematics and physics. He found a university position and began researching nuclear for Ontario Hydro Research and hydroelectric power generation for Nova Scotia Power. He contributed to a model study of flood protection for the City of Venice conducted by the Dutch Hydrodynamics Laboratories in Delft. He worked on a fusion energy project the Joint European Taurus (JET) in England. In retirement, he has worked for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and with Babcock and Wilcox, Ontario Power Generation, and Atomic Energy of Canada. He talks of the evolution of computational tools from slide rules to computers and their applications to autonomous vehicles – and the importance of selecting the appropriate tool to max the complexity of a problem.

Mechanical engineer Dr. Martin Fandrich recalls feeling engineering was the right career when he recognized he could readily visualize cross sections of objects in an undergraduate graphics class. He received a prestigious scholarship to earn his PhD from the University of Cambridge, studying vibrations. He returned to work for Rolls-Royce in Montreal, in particular the conversion of gas turbine engines originally designed for aircraft to become stationary plants for power generation. H returned to the UK to work for five years at Frazer-Nash Consultancy, working on projects "as diverse as a child's tire swing and a nuclear power plant." He subsequently created his own consulting company, Bannerman Consultants in British Columbia, where he enjoys the variety of the projects that he works on. These include: a heated press that applies a glue component to turn cleaned chopsticks into a substantial block; a mechanized boat lift for a marina; and failure analysis work. He stresses the importance of effective communication in engineering and encourages new graduate Engineers-in-Training to be humble so that they can learn from all participating in a project.