Peter Young, UK head of Arup Advanced Technology & Research

You can tell you’re in an engineering practice as soon as you step into Arup’s offices. Of course, the meticulous model of the streetscape around St Paul’s Cathedral and the pictures of bridges and buildings, all cool geometry and shining materials, are good clues, but what really gives it away are the lifts. Rather than just an up or down button, the control panels ask you which floor you want when you call the lift. When it arrives, the floor panel in front of the doors lights up.

’It makes complete sense,’ said Peter Young, UK head of the civil engineering firm’s Advanced Technology and Research (AT+R) division. ’The lift system can plan when it sends the lifts down and makes sure the floor visits are planned out in the optimum order, so nobody waits longer than required.’

It’s the sort of oblique-thinking attention to detail that Arup likes to project into the world, and Young, whose shaven head and measured way of speaking give him the stripped-down aspect of many of the company’s trademark structures, carries through that impression. A specialist in analysing and countering vibration in structures, Young’s early work with Arup included working on the scheme to dampen the infamous ’wobble’ in London’s Millennium Bridge, the pedestrian river crossing linking St Paul’s with Tate Modern. Since then he’s worked on many vibration-damping systems, for buildings in earthquake zones and for tall structures vulnerable to the buffeting of the wind.

One such structure is the Air Force Memorial in Washington, DC: three slim, curved steel spires, the tallest more than 80m high, which contain vibration dampers made from heavy lead balls within steel boxes. ’When the wind blows, the balls bash against the wall of the box and dissipate the vibration energy,’ Young said. The key to the design was the relative size of the balls and boxes. ’It’s a very simple concept, based on Newton’s Law of Restitution; and it’s completely maintenance free and invisible.’

But Young’s work within AT+R takes in a wide variety of other engineering sectors as well. Arup covers a surprising variety of areas: as well as the civil engineering the firm is well known for, it also looks at such subjects as the packaging and transport of nuclear waste; the structural integrity of oil rigs and other offshore structures; and is developing a presence looking at the infrastructure surrounding electric cars.

The AT+R department exists mainly to supply specialist services to the other parts of the business, Young explained. ’We hold the seismic specialists and wind specialists for the firm, as not everyone who does bridges and buildings can maintain a niche specialism in these areas,’ he said. ’We also offer those services to external clients.’

External work was in fact the origin of the department, when the Central Electricity Generating Board turned to Arup to investigate the integrity of the containers used to carry nuclear waste to Sellafield in the mid-1980s. ’They were worried about the integrity in a worst-case scenario, which would be if it fell off a lorry onto a train track and a diesel loco smashed into it,’ Young said. ’That’s a very non-linear event: the steel flask would deform way beyond its normal shape and then recover back. We were asked to do an extensive analysis to predict the behaviour of the flask, which we did and predicted it wouldn’t rupture. They then did a full-scale test and we were right.’

Arup’s engineers spend time thinking about where technology could push society, and vice-versa

This expertise in non-linear analysis was carried into the automotive sector to predict the response of new car chassis and bodies to crash tests. ’If you can simulate the crash and feed it into the design process, it takes a lot of time off the development process and saves money on repeated testing,’ Young said. The same non-linear analysis systems were used to simulate concrete subsea structures, and soon came to the attention of civil engineers in Japan trying to design complex buildings in an earthquake-prone region. ’People there are very open to using technology to demonstrate the performance of structures,’ he said. ’We did some work with the Osaka International Conference Centre, theToyota Stadium and Maison Hermès in Tokyo, which has a unique seismic solution with columns that lift off the ground.’

Arup’s corporate structure encourages the development of new specialisms, such as the group looking at electric cars. ’Arup is owned, more or less, by its employees, so we’re not driven solely by shareholder value,’ Young said. ’We seek to do interesting work, not necessarily bottom-line driven, but by doing new things: staying at the technological leading edge and investing in that.’

Arup’s engineers spend time thinking about where technology could push society, and vice-versa. ’The way something such as our electric vehicle business comes into being is that one person thinks it’s a good idea, it’ll be big in a few years time; we then discuss it and see how much it’ll cost to develop that capability and we’ll invest in developing that. Inevitably, they’re driven by the passion and enthusiasm of people, rather than the business driving it.’

The fact that this happens within a company that is capable of designing, building and delivering complex engineering is a distinct advantage. ’We have expertise everywhere. We have people who understand power transmission, we have metallurgists and we have all kinds of technical specialists. We have a strong knowledge management system that allows people to understand and access that knowledge. Plus there’s a culture of willingness to share that expertise. If someone were working on electric cars and needed to know how the Grid operates, for example, it would be easy to find them, chat to them and get them involved in the project.’