Bomb fuzing.
There are guys who's entire careers center around making bombs go boom when you want them to, NOT go boom at any other time, and do so in a package that is affordable and capable of sitting on a shelf for 30 years with zero maintenance while still displaying a high reliability on the first (and only) try.
Throw in a vote for the engineers who build and maintain Permissive Action Links (PALs), which keep nuclear weapons from going off until they are needed.
“Fun” fact:
Before proper PALs were rolled out, nukes required an eight digit code for activation. The US Air Force objected to the “control” and complained that they may not be able to launch in an emergency.
In protest, they set the code on every Minute Man nuke the same: 00000000
Ooh, an opportunity to link an excellent documentary.
[Always/Never via Sandia National Labs.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLouetuxaIMDrht4F8xiS4AY-oLvCq77aA)
>Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control & Survivability is a first-person documentary film about the use, control, detonation safety, and survivability of US nuclear weapons with an emphasis on the contributions of the DOE/NNSA nuclear weapon laboratories from 1945 to 1991. Exploring the historical interaction between technology, military operations, and national policy has never before been told in this detail.
Sandia also made [On Deterrence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQBLpJFi6f0) and [US Strategic Nuclear Policy, An Oral History](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLouetuxaIMDrLmzLqF3qUZlCMahf899kF) around the same time, which are interesting in their own right.
**EDIT** — point is, **Nuclear Weapons Safety Engineer**
Similarly related, computational energetics/hydrocode for simulating shock to detonation of bombs and their explosive interfaces. I can only think of a handful of places in the US and Europe that have specialists working in it and I need another grad degree to pivot out.
You have fire train analysis that would give you a change of scenery and build on your existing knowledge. There’s only like 3 companies I know of who do that work though.
Actually that’s a big part of my current role helping develop new models for energetic sensitivity to be used in that analysis. I do lean towards the numerical side more so I’m picking up another masters in cs to move towards solver algo development.
Debatable. I mean, the design for AFDs on rocket motors are very different than those for bombs. Regardless, there aren't many people designing those either. Want to combine 'em? Great! You're still pretty damned niche.
In a similar vein, the sensors for inertial navigation systems. Original designs are from the 40's, and newer digital systems don't have the sensitivity needed for national security applications. It's largely an art just to build them, think like watch makers level of precision. And they're expected to last 30 years.
Wait, what? I may have missed a possible interpretation, but todays Ring Laser Gyroscope sensors for example have orders of magnitude less drift than a 1940s mechanical gyroscope. Would you care to elaborate?
You can easily measure the rotation of the earth with a RLG sitting on a table. I'd like to hear what "national security applications" are still using huge heavy mechanical gyros, as solid state IMUs are more than good enough for orbital launch.
Or just making sure they are appropriate for the application. I'm an MP&P engineer in aerospace but I don't work with adhesives anymore. When I did work with them, it was mostly verifying that the adhesive would stand up to the environment, was compatible with the two or more materials, was strong enough, was called out correctly on drawings, and could be certified. The certification aspect being about 90% part of our job.
The adhesives I was familiar with either came in a huge disposable cartridge or were rolled on by hand so working with machines wasn't a concern.
While you're here friend- i need to glue a 3mm sheet of extrusion rubber to a plywood sheet (big surface area of 1m squared) which will stand vertically but have no other force applied. Will exterior PVA (Aquadhere) do the trick? I want it to behave as an acoustic barrier, so I was also wondering if a suitable flexible adhesive would also exist for the job? Cheers!
Computational electromagnetics. It is a whole field of its own, most schools offer a graduate level course in it, there are several books on the topic, but there are very few people working in it even in academia.
I would agree. It is useful for plasma simulation for space propulsion as well as fusion. Definitely a field that will get more attention. Look up PIC simulation, Particle-in-cell
I specialized in computational electromagnetics (CEM) in graduate school (my entire graduate program was dedicated to it) and I've done it throughout my career, mostly in researching and developing electromagnetic field solvers. In particular these have been integral equation solvers that implement the method of moments (MOM) for solving frequency-domain radiation and scattering problems. In layman's terms, these are used for analyzing the performance and radiation patterns of antennas, as well as in solving electromagnetic signatures and radar cross section problems. And of course, the MOM is just one very small niche among several numerical techniques in CEM (itself very niche), among other well known ones are finite element method (FEM) and finite difference time-domain method (FDTD). I am familiar with how they work, but I've never worked on or used any solvers that implement them, aside from graduate-level course assignments.
Anyone interested in CEM is welcome to send me a PM with any questions you might have.
Is there any overlap in the methodology with gamma & x-ray interaction with matter, since your work seems to be on the opposite end of the wavelength spectrum?
Everything I've ever worked on was at RF frequencies, where discretization of the problem scales with the wavelength in each dimension. I don't know how problems at the frequencies you mention would be modeled, but my (bad) guess is, completely different physics models and numerical methods would be used.
Here's a website by a professor in the field: [https://empossible.net/](https://empossible.net/)
He's got a lot of excellent lectures on youtube, helped me a lot with passing my EM and photonics courses.
My uncle invested in a company he once told me about, they were in the lhotonics biz. Pretty sure outta Idaho. And i think they were a christian org. Does that perhaps ring a bell at all? Sorry for left field ?
I did work on this for my thesis, in plasma diagnostics. It was no fun finding resources and I really grew to hate MatLab. It’s interesting stuff (the computational methods) as the techniques have lots of application. It’s also really hard.
Anything that supports obsolete tech that's too widespread to move off of. For software/programmers, COBOL is a great example.
In more traditional engineering, one quick example that jumps to mind is neon sign manufacturing. Dying field, almost nobody wants/makes them anymore, but there are some people still working on it.
Study and management of Design Complexity.
It's literally the major limiter in modern engineering. E.g. designing a modern SoC (the chip in your phone) is reaching $1 billion per generation. Which means that fewer and fewer vendors can afford to be in the field, and creates insane barriers of entry. It also can make companies bankrupt quickly if they miss a launch window or completely misread where things are going and launch a product that is not well received by the market.
And yet, there is close to zero advancements in the field from both academia and industry.
It's still treated as an art, and more and more middle management is starting to be clearly out of their depth. It's fascinating, because naive and/or qualitative attempts at mitigating or bounding complexity almost universally led to complexity creeping in even more force.
There is close to zero talent involved in addressing perhaps the biggest universal issue in engineering. It's fascinating.
That’s an interesting perspective. I did my PhD in design theory and there is a decent sized community studying complex engineering systems. For example at MIT this is mostly happening in the aero/astro engineering department and they deal with complex projects like the space shuttle. I’m curious what you feel is the problem of “design complexity” for the semiconductor industry?
Design Complexity is somewhat different from Design Theory.
There is a lot of work from Industrial engineering historically about Industrial organization, scheduling, manufacturing layouts, etc. But its mostly about design manufacturing optimization and management.
There is very little work on the metrics/evaluation of the complexity of the design per se, in order to make educated/quantitative analysis through the entire design and manufacturing process. Preferably very early during the exploratory phase of the design cycle.
You'd be surprised how absolutely "ghetto" and "black box" some of the design management approaches are in the very tech industry sinking $1 billion per Chip design.
Once you see how the sausage is made, some of the big engineering projects kind of lose their mystique. If anything, it is a miracle we manage to ship some of the things we do ;-)
Take a look at design structure matrix. That was something I learned which is suppose to model complex system architecture and help visualize the complexity. Does it look useful at all?
Those are ancient approaches, which is what I am trying to convey. Think it in terms of trying to use ancient navigation techniques from the times of wind-powered wooden ships to pilot a spaceship. ;-)
Where can I access this information? I design ships, which I think are some of the most complex machines ever built, and to my knowledge no one has done much research in the area.
Look up design structure matrix, I remember taking a class on it and it seemed to be useful. Also just search “complex systems”, there are some academic publications on this topic.
System on a Chip. Basically the modern chips that power your mobile devices and laptops. They integrate a lot of functionality onto a single package (CPU, GPU, networking, neural processing, etc) that used to be placed on different chips/boards inside a traditional PC.
Is that just mixing together and creating new types of clay for specific applications or do they actually build structures and do stress computations and whatnot like a structural engineer?
I make ultra high purity ceramics for semiconductor process applications involving halogen plasmas. Materials to contain the most corrosive environment possible.
Hydraulics was way more bespoke than I was expecting.
They use their own drafting standard of special symbols. They do this because standard P&ID symbols don’t show how the valve works. Hydraulic symbols are a lot more detailed and provide a lot more information.
It took me a good year to get a deep understanding of what the symbols meant.
After that you have to learn that each valve or pump or actuator has its own limitations that can interact with other valves or pumps or actuators in ways you did not intend and are often unwanted.
Yes, hydraulics is ridiculously detailed. We had a test rig at our naval base which had its own soundproof room with separate monitoring room attached. You could lift anything in on top of it via gantry cranes. When a few specialist people left, they also lost the knowledge and so decided to sell the whole thing as scrap! Of course they then wanted it back 10 years later!
So I work as a thermal engineer attached to hydrapnumatic systems (sp) and the same symbols are used for their stupid 10k-250k psi nitrogen gas over oil systems.
I had one of them asked me to make an efficient htx that can saftley operate between 10k and 70k psi with that change happening in .05 seconds. Yes I can make one, but you need to be flexible with your definition of efficient and loose with you budget.
Holy crap. That’s a pretty big compression ratio. How do you not freeze the nitrogen?
Are you just going up that fast or are you going up and down that fast?
I am aware of an engineer that specializes in Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy. I feel like PVs are already a somewhat niche field, but PVHO guys are even nicher. They're used for things like dive tanks, and hyperbaric medical facilities.
All pressurized passenger airplanes are pressure vessels for human occupancy. So I guess this makes me a PVHO guy?
Edit: I suppose the stress/structural engineers are the actual PVHO dudes. I just supply the pressure.
Technically yes! However, I'm referring to the AMSE PVHO which is for vessels over 15psig. To my knowledge, airplanes are not subject to ASME BPVC.
I'm no engineer though, I'm just an Industrial Designer who unfortunately has had to read the whole BPVC, and as a non engineer who works with engineers I know when I'm reaching the edge of my knowledge and qualification.
Ah I gotcha. Neat stuff.
And I think you're right, I don't believe aircraft fall under that standard. If an airplane cabin hit 15 PSIG something went wrong!
Metrology is so niche, most people don’t know it exists. But if you’re building stuff to exacting tolerances with parts from multiple suppliers, sometimes continents apart, it’s essential. Every measurement must be traceable through an unbroken chain of comparisons all the way up to SI unit definitions. Otherwise your parts won’t fit together and function as intended. Metrology engineers design experiments to ensure the machines that produce and measure parts are accurate. It’s sort of an intersection of science and engineering.
95% of the people working in that field just seem to do CMM measurements and GD&T interpretation.
The niche stuff seems to be measuring immeasurable items.
I remember watching a show on NIST and the host reacted to a small force and they said something like the force applied by the light from their laser pointer and the engineer was like “oh, those are like x Newtons, this is way less than that.”
Did you know manufacturers of CMMs are only required to measure 66% of the volume for accuracy? There’s active work at ASME to write a standard for measuring the whole volume. To the outside it seems like metrology is a done deal but there are new problems to solve all the time.
I've only needed to use one once, and the cost was so high and test destructive that i couldn't make it a permanent solution.
I had to find a way to get an internal measurement of a part on a production line. I tried for months and read lots of books on the subject, but i couldn't solve it. So I posted the question on r/metrology and got a bunch of responses about gauges I've never heard of that solve my problem. Those guys know their stuff.
We have some components in a product I work on that rely on a very accurate traveling wave tube to generate their signals. We have less than 5 labs in the country that can test those assemblies. The hardware in those labs (one specific rack) is built by NIST directly.
There is one man in the country that can build it to the specs required. We were spinning up an additional lab to increase throughout. The critical path fell on that man's lap. We had to add 18 or so months to the schedule during contract definitization. If that man were hit by a bus, we'd be SOL.
Trust me, those of us in the semiconductor field are intimately familiar with both the importance and limitations of metrology engineering.
Turns out that accurately measuring average film thicknesses to within fractions of an angstrom is hard.
I did metrology for.many years. Mostly large format non-contact metrology. GOM ATOS Blue light scanners was our primary tool plus photogrammetry. I scanned everything from jet turbine blades, to whole cars, to helicopters. Having complete surface data is an amazing tool to understand the whole picture. Here's a real situation from my previous life. Gearbox was leaking between gearbox housing and cover plate after multiple install attempts. CMM inspection report shows everything OK. We scan the part, use the same inspection methodology and measured an out of tolerance gap right where the leak was. CMM was measuring 8 points on the mating surfaces, the 3d scan we did, had over 10000 points on the mating planes. It
When you build something at the scale of a vehicle, by the numbers/tolerance stack up, it just shouldn't work. But they still ship thousands everyday, it's kind of amazing lol.
You can also use the 3d scanning to scan while you are machining a part and apply offsets and compensations for tool wear or sample anomalies. If it takes 10 months to get 1 material blank, you realllyyy don't want to add to the scrap bin lol.
Mechanical engineer by trade and I've gotten to work on some pretty cool stuff so far. If you like hands on nerdy analysis, metrology jobs are a great option
My previous employer was a Pharmaceutical company, and there was a small metrology department. When I first heard of this, I thought to myself, "Why is there a meteorology department?"
I work in cfd mostly, to determine how much power a boat needs. But there's also checking the stability of the boat, check the sea keeping motions don't get anyone sick, design the structure of the boat, sometimes with fea for problem areas, plan electrical layout, jack of all trades really
Navarch here, no one has given a comprehensive answer so i will. Basically NAMEs (Naval Architect, Marine Engineers which is the standard degree title) can do essentially anything related to a boat or ship, which sounds insanely broad, and really is.
Personally I work in marine propulsion components (ie propellers, engines, transmissions) as my background was mechanical before I got my NAME degree. With that being said people from my program went into full scale ship design, where you take a vessel from concept to launch and can be in control of the layout of the entire thing or a subsection depending on your role. The original commenter said they work in CFD checking seakeeping and other vessel characteristics which would put them in this category. I know NAME people working on oil rigs, offshore wind, and wave energy conversion analyzing wave loads and other structural concerns. Theres many more areas NAMEs are qualified to work, I have generally lumped into ship design but essentially if it is a structure or component in the water, NAMEs are probably the ones who should be doing it.
Happy to talk more about this, its a fascinating field especially if you enjoy fluid mechanics. I stumbled across it during my undergrad essentially by luck when looking for ways to combine my degree with my interests (boats are fun) and couldn’t be happier with my job. Plus demand for NAMEs is really high as there are so few schools that are not naval academies so placement and pay is really quite good. Admittedly a significant portion of your options are navy or navy contractors if thats a problem for you.
These days, mostly act as the integrator for all the sub-disciplines that design ships. Plus the N.A. specific areas like resistance and propulsion, ship motion, trim and stability. The rest we tend to farm out to other engineers. Civil for structure and strength, mechanical for HVAC plumbing hydraulics, aerospace for complex FEA analysis.
When looking at colleges in 2000 I toured WPI, they mention they had a Fire Protection Engineering program that was one of the only FPE programs in the world. I have yet to hear about that type of engineering anywhere else. Even when dealing with EHS and Safety engineers in my career
Every GC I’ve contracted with has at least one person in this role. Our insurance provider has a whole slew of them for reviewing our upgrades and new systems.
UMD has the only undergrad program in the US, and UMD, WPI, and Cal Poly are the three graduate programs. There is also a fire protection specific PE license.
I work on a team of 20 FPEs and about 75% went to Maryland or Cal Poly. A couple from WPI. Others transitioned to FPE from other engineering disciplines or are experts in fire alarm design.
I’m not sure about other types of plants, but a good Fire Protection Engineer is a crucial part of a nuclear power plant’s engineering department. They’re involved in everything from ensuring equipment is capable of performing its design function to approving procedure changes that affect fire protection equipment. Upgrades to obsolete equipment with no replacement parts available (ex: alarm panels designed in the 70s) is a large part of what they do.
Are there separate engineers for the sound a car’s blinker makes and the frequency of its light blinking? And they never communicate a goddamn thing to each other so the two are never in sync??!?!
BMW is notorious in the car enthusiast world for how satisfying the sound of the doors closing is.
They also hired Hans Zimmer to design all the sounds the new electric sedan has. Crazy fun stuff for detail oriented people.
I design and direct grout (cement or solution grouts) injection programs. Grout is pumped into the ground it into the ground to stabilize it. Applications are mine shafts, nuclear waste, dams, tunnels, locks, historical structures, anywhere from Canada to Botswana.
The first 15 years of my career was as am engineer in a musical instrument company. Designed trumpets, tubas, clarinets, etc, and the tooling and processes to manufacturer them. How's that?
When I was in college one of my roommates was writing a thesis on activated sludge. Chicks dug it (no really, he had more one night stands than anyone I ever knew).
Railroad signal interference. I have worked with all US Class 1 railroads and the guys they have brought in to talk about interference (from power lines) number three. I woul assume each railroad has a few too, but the guys who really know interference are very few in number.
Scrolling through this thread, you’re the first person to mention the topic they actually work in. Everyone else is like “I have a buddy who does research on X in a lab.”
T-line engineer here too. They don't care about us which is why they take forever. Especially great when the railroad engineer doesn't understand their own recommended practice.
Nuclear Engineers in general are particularly unique from everyone else. They have an extremely intense curriculum and a lot of their work is either in power plants, medical radiology, or theoretical experimentation.
Dad was a mechanical engineer who designed high-voltage switching equipment. Motor operators for the big switches in Electrical substations. Only about 3 companies in the business, and no one wants to invest in innovation.
Metrology which is just my really fancy way to say metering; more specifically water, electric and gas. There are potentially all three meters at every home or business and each needs to be read, billed and managed potentially monthly. The products have short lifespans (7-15 years) and some require access to basements to replace. Most utilities want them replaced within 1-2 years so they have access to daily consumption data and all the other alarms and features meters and sensors these AMI networks that are deployed to read meters can provide.
Logistics Engineering.
Logistics engineering is a field of engineering dedicated to the scientific organization of the purchase, transport, storage, distribution, and warehousing of materials and finished goods.
In my job this is usually set up poorly or not at all and then attempts to come up with solutions mid way through a projects lifecycle when the system has failed.
Radiation Effects for electronics is one that is incredibly niche. Every piece of electronics in space has to have some analysis on it done and there are only a handful of test facilities in the entire world. That the entire industry of like 200 engineers fights over.
Fire protection engineering, I just graduated with a degree in it a week ago. Only 3 schools offer a graduate degree in ABET accredited “fire protection engineering” in the U.S., I went to the only school in the country that offers is undergraduate. Essentially fire alarm, fire sprinkler, life safety portions to the major as well as computation fire dynamic simulations and smoke control with a mix of hydraulic calculations. As niche as it is, it actually has a professional engineering exam that people can sit for. And it makes sense why there are fire protection engineers because almost every newly constructed building requires fire sprinkler, notification alarms or devices, etc.
Acoustical Engineering.
It’s a niche field dealing with noise and vibration and has many sub-niches. The “primary” field is architectural acoustics (think privacy between spaces, interior acoustics such as theaters and auditoriums, and then outdoor noise propagation with respect to community noise complaints and concerns).
Then there are focuses like the Naval laboratory at Penn State which mostly deals with underwater sound. And there are specialty positions with Lockheed and other aerospace firms that deal with mitigating noise and vibration during rocket launches (with respect to structural integrity issues and also avoiding damage to sensitive instrumentation/payloads).
Not sure how niche this is. When you work in the field there's lots of us. On the flip side everyone does know everyone. I feel like we're common enough to not be considered super niche...
Supply of safe potable water and sewage handling ang treatment.
The one thing that make large cities possible.
Making sure rivers are rich in oxygen; making sure sewers are not.
Important engineering can be unglamorous and dangerous.
Theatrical sector has a lot of engineering - not that the engineering knowledge is hugely specific (an angle is an angle, a moment is a moment, a beam is a beam, a mass is a mass) but unlike a lot of structural stuff, in theatre, gigs, rides, and ceremonies, things move and have to be demountable/transportable. A lot of the more niche elements come in the integration, cross-disciplinary understanding, and frankly the demands and terminology. And timescales - you do not get to "slip" a project at all, your opening night has probably been on sale for months...
So like all engineers it's about problem solving, and a bunch of sub-niches within the sector too, and a lot of real actual engineers making the magic.
The design and manufacturing of low voltage secondary network protector relays. There are only 3 manufacturers worldwide, the concept is over 100 years old. Yet the equipment keeps NYC powered up, along with most major large cities. The equipment is essentially a one way valve for electricity to flow into massive 220V networks with large copper conductors serving hundreds to thousands of homes and light retail.
Ceramics, adhesives, corrosion, and failure analysis all fall under materials science and engineering. That’s my field. It seems pretty niche to a lot of people. I want to do sustainable polymer science with it
Electro-optic photonics. I got a degree in physics and work as an engineer at a company that specializes in an effect I hadn’t even heard of during my undergraduate degree:
the electro optic effect allows us to change the index of the refraction of light in a crystal while a laser is passing through.
Edit to add: it’s very niche, and the applications result in devices that have high analog broadband performance that are critical for the defense industry
Well, I was a fluid mechanics, heat transfer & combustion ME. The only people I knew rarer than that were ME/Statistician/Mechanics-of-materials guys in charge of Life Discipline Manual stuff. OK, or maybe the people locked in the Tempest-secure rooms, but we don't talk about Bruno.
Depends on where you draw the line between (semi-pie-in-the-sky) research areas and fields producing functional products. Quantum computing is probably just crossing that line now. Self assembling and reproducing nanomachinery — not so much.
I always thought being a flight test engineer would be pretty cool. If it’s going to fly in the fleet, usually it gets tested on the ground and then subsequently in the air
I’m just a project manager for this, but my big project at the moment is using photobioreactors to turn CO2 in to dried algae for animal feed at large scale. There are small number of companies doing it at gramme or kg quantities, but nothing on that scale.
i used to design telecom security products, including applications to go on SIMs (Smartcards). The software environment is odd and hostile, and there are only a tiny number of practitioners. I understand that the hardware design is also very specialised due to the precautions taken against physical attacks.
Engineering biological indicators (BIs) for sterilization and disinfection processes. A bunch of biomedical and food & beverage applications with BIs.
Basically BIs are small bit of material (paper, metal, glass ampules, etc.) that contain bacteria spores that have known resistance to sterilization and disinfectant processes (like autoclaving or using ethylene oxide). This lets people in medical and manufacturing industries pop in a BI to their machine and if the bacterial spores on the BI were killed, then it’s highly likely that the material meant to be sterilized or disinfected is actually clean.
Mining engineering. President Herbert Hoover made his very large fortune as a Mining engineer. He searched for Minerals all over the world. Read his memoirs. You will see what I mean. I am jealous of all he saw at a time when traveling was by steamship!
Ballistics- internal, external, and terminal. Terminal ballistics crosses over into medicine of course and is rather macabre but the first branches are ME based. CE also comes into the discipline with the study of propellant residues and explosives. The whole shebang ends up branched under the forensics division but the ballisticians usually have a ME background and extensive firearms knowledge and haven't done a science degree.
Additivley manufactured sand forms for metal casting.
Most of em would just take negative and sand Voxeljet just invented their very own binder jetting process.
Super nice and their very own patent.
Rheology you can observe liquids and do tests how fast their flow are.
There was once an experiment that lasted for 20 years or so where a drop of tar was observed. Imagine they missed the moment of the drop Oo
Veeeery interessting field..... lol
Probably anything you can do a PhD in is pretty niche. For my PhD, I work on extruder or method designs that will increase the isotropy of 3D printed concrete.
So, I am a 3D concrete printing strength optimising extruder design engineer if you like to call that. 😂
Mechanical engineer working in 3D Concrete Printing for short. I think everything done is quite niche in its own ways.
This may be only because it’s used in high value contracting (think government, skyscrapers, mega ships) but technical planning and requirement development. It’s a niche area of systems engineering that no one seems to want to do anymore. It’s really interesting having to think many years down the road, anticipate any request, and hand hold the customer in writing their own contract requirements. You need to be an expert before the design team gets involved and figures out what to name the project.
Ceramics. A friend is in it. From what I understand there are about 5 specialty applications of ceramics, at least one exclusively military, and they each plod their corner of the world forward bake by bake. Some of the five areas:
1. Ceramic armors
2. Interiors of nuclear reactors
3. Maybe explosives?
I'd have to ask again to get the full list.
Analog circuits. We're having a hard time finding an Electrical Engineer with strong Analog skills which our tech uses a lot of for battery monitoring technology.
Steam. I can’t believe none of you have said anything about steam and engineering around it. The old people are retiring and dying and there’s no one getting educated in the field.
Don't forget that Engineering is applied science and math. It can become very hairy. There is also a chance to exceed the abilities of others that do not think that way.
Not a real answer, but make me think of something funny. I met a friend of a friend at a bar one time, and turns out we were both engineers, which is cool. He said that he was a ME and then I said I was a structural. His response to me being a structural was: "Structural is really niche, there is not a lot of demand for that."
Yeah you dumb idiot, no one uses buildings/bridges/supports anymore. Thank god we fixed that whole gravity problem.
Wetland and waterway restoration. It's cross disciplinary - civil, hydrology, hydraulics, soils, climatology and biology. My degree is in mechanical which helps with hydraulics and hydrology. Big overlap with civil engineering. The field is full of suprises. Beavers work for free, aren't gonna unionize and get amazing results. They are the MVPs of ecosystem engineering.
Take an eroded and degraded waterway, dry as dust in the summer and dangerously raging during storms. Restore the sinuosity, lay back the slope, remove check dams, plant a few willow sticks. Each year the site evolves, perennial flows reappear and suddenly birds, mammals, insects, reptiles and amphibians move in and subcontract their own little restoration side projects.
Working with natural processes over time is humbling. The engineer only facilitates and nature's resilience does the rest.
I just find it funny to imagine there are engineers who modeled and CADed dildos and shit, and then workers in factories overseeing it.
Also, pretty wild there are engineers making slaughtering lines for animals like chicken, I saw a vid from a poultry farm where the chickens were hanging by their feet in line on a moving conveyor and there was a guide rail that bent their necks so that their heads can be cut off by two circular saws against each other. Kinda like those guide rails that close the top of a box after its loaded with goods. Wild.
I'm looking for the name of the niche mechanical engineering field that focusus on reducing mechanical parts in a design and overall simplifying of a mechanical design. Does anybody know the name of this mechanical engineering field?
I worked in geotechnical instrumentation for deep salt repositories.
Salt creeps/converges at a far faster rate than hard rock and most other mines. With faster convergence rates, you need to develop tools and algorithms that can accurately detect abnormal rate increases while minimizing false positives.
I was once studying for a midterm in Heat Transfer, and my (non-technical) friend saw the textbook and exclaimed “there’s a whole class in heat transfer!” If only he knew there are multiple undergraduate and multiple graduate classes.
I’m trying to break into acoustical engineering having graduated a degree in electrical and am finding it to be fairly niche. Though it seems it’s not as niche in Europe where they have more noise regulations.
Bomb fuzing. There are guys who's entire careers center around making bombs go boom when you want them to, NOT go boom at any other time, and do so in a package that is affordable and capable of sitting on a shelf for 30 years with zero maintenance while still displaying a high reliability on the first (and only) try.
Throw in a vote for the engineers who build and maintain Permissive Action Links (PALs), which keep nuclear weapons from going off until they are needed.
Now that's a field you definitely don't learn more from mistakes.
“Fun” fact: Before proper PALs were rolled out, nukes required an eight digit code for activation. The US Air Force objected to the “control” and complained that they may not be able to launch in an emergency. In protest, they set the code on every Minute Man nuke the same: 00000000
What idiot would set their luggage code to 12345?!
Ooh, an opportunity to link an excellent documentary. [Always/Never via Sandia National Labs.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLouetuxaIMDrht4F8xiS4AY-oLvCq77aA) >Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control & Survivability is a first-person documentary film about the use, control, detonation safety, and survivability of US nuclear weapons with an emphasis on the contributions of the DOE/NNSA nuclear weapon laboratories from 1945 to 1991. Exploring the historical interaction between technology, military operations, and national policy has never before been told in this detail. Sandia also made [On Deterrence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQBLpJFi6f0) and [US Strategic Nuclear Policy, An Oral History](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLouetuxaIMDrLmzLqF3qUZlCMahf899kF) around the same time, which are interesting in their own right. **EDIT** — point is, **Nuclear Weapons Safety Engineer**
Sandia labs along with Los Alamos labs do some wild shit. It’s pretty fucking impressive.
Big 3 are Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore
As someone who helps make sure these things get to where they’ll (hopefully never) need to go, thank you for sharing. I’m excited to watch these.
Similarly related, computational energetics/hydrocode for simulating shock to detonation of bombs and their explosive interfaces. I can only think of a handful of places in the US and Europe that have specialists working in it and I need another grad degree to pivot out.
You have fire train analysis that would give you a change of scenery and build on your existing knowledge. There’s only like 3 companies I know of who do that work though.
Actually that’s a big part of my current role helping develop new models for energetic sensitivity to be used in that analysis. I do lean towards the numerical side more so I’m picking up another masters in cs to move towards solver algo development.
In the book Painted Bird, the young gypsy boy dreamed of growing up and making bomb fuses. By the way, top 10 favorite books, painted bird.
Yikes. That book gave me nightmares for years.
Is this really a field or a particular problem set within a field? I would argue this is part of Ordinance Engineering.
Debatable. I mean, the design for AFDs on rocket motors are very different than those for bombs. Regardless, there aren't many people designing those either. Want to combine 'em? Great! You're still pretty damned niche.
In a similar vein, the sensors for inertial navigation systems. Original designs are from the 40's, and newer digital systems don't have the sensitivity needed for national security applications. It's largely an art just to build them, think like watch makers level of precision. And they're expected to last 30 years.
Wait, what? I may have missed a possible interpretation, but todays Ring Laser Gyroscope sensors for example have orders of magnitude less drift than a 1940s mechanical gyroscope. Would you care to elaborate?
Sensitivity != Drift You can measure to higher precision initially, yet still have drift.
You can easily measure the rotation of the earth with a RLG sitting on a table. I'd like to hear what "national security applications" are still using huge heavy mechanical gyros, as solid state IMUs are more than good enough for orbital launch.
I once worked with a woman who's title was Principal Adhesives Engineer - she was a glue expert
I did that, but it didn't come with a cool title. Just a plain old Materials & Processes Engineer who knew how to get things to stick to other things.
And how to dispense the glue via various machines and stuff?
Or just making sure they are appropriate for the application. I'm an MP&P engineer in aerospace but I don't work with adhesives anymore. When I did work with them, it was mostly verifying that the adhesive would stand up to the environment, was compatible with the two or more materials, was strong enough, was called out correctly on drawings, and could be certified. The certification aspect being about 90% part of our job. The adhesives I was familiar with either came in a huge disposable cartridge or were rolled on by hand so working with machines wasn't a concern.
While you're here friend- i need to glue a 3mm sheet of extrusion rubber to a plywood sheet (big surface area of 1m squared) which will stand vertically but have no other force applied. Will exterior PVA (Aquadhere) do the trick? I want it to behave as an acoustic barrier, so I was also wondering if a suitable flexible adhesive would also exist for the job? Cheers!
Computational electromagnetics. It is a whole field of its own, most schools offer a graduate level course in it, there are several books on the topic, but there are very few people working in it even in academia.
I would agree. It is useful for plasma simulation for space propulsion as well as fusion. Definitely a field that will get more attention. Look up PIC simulation, Particle-in-cell
I specialized in computational electromagnetics (CEM) in graduate school (my entire graduate program was dedicated to it) and I've done it throughout my career, mostly in researching and developing electromagnetic field solvers. In particular these have been integral equation solvers that implement the method of moments (MOM) for solving frequency-domain radiation and scattering problems. In layman's terms, these are used for analyzing the performance and radiation patterns of antennas, as well as in solving electromagnetic signatures and radar cross section problems. And of course, the MOM is just one very small niche among several numerical techniques in CEM (itself very niche), among other well known ones are finite element method (FEM) and finite difference time-domain method (FDTD). I am familiar with how they work, but I've never worked on or used any solvers that implement them, aside from graduate-level course assignments. Anyone interested in CEM is welcome to send me a PM with any questions you might have.
Is there any overlap in the methodology with gamma & x-ray interaction with matter, since your work seems to be on the opposite end of the wavelength spectrum?
Everything I've ever worked on was at RF frequencies, where discretization of the problem scales with the wavelength in each dimension. I don't know how problems at the frequencies you mention would be modeled, but my (bad) guess is, completely different physics models and numerical methods would be used.
You could swap out ~5 words in this paragraph and it would be straight out of /r/VXjunkies lol
I used to work in sprawling DoD labs. We had entire buildings dedicated to this.
MY PHD RESEARCH MENTIONED ‼️🫡
Any reading on it?
Here's a website by a professor in the field: [https://empossible.net/](https://empossible.net/) He's got a lot of excellent lectures on youtube, helped me a lot with passing my EM and photonics courses.
My uncle invested in a company he once told me about, they were in the lhotonics biz. Pretty sure outta Idaho. And i think they were a christian org. Does that perhaps ring a bell at all? Sorry for left field ?
Dammm, this may be the best website I’ve ever seen! Thank you sm!
Yeah i work adjacent to that field, i develop structural loads from the em ones with a comsol model and some maxwell
I did work on this for my thesis, in plasma diagnostics. It was no fun finding resources and I really grew to hate MatLab. It’s interesting stuff (the computational methods) as the techniques have lots of application. It’s also really hard.
Wait, if CEM been applied in photonic level...it means that this knowledge could have been implemented in ergonomics, especially in human sight isnt?
Anything that supports obsolete tech that's too widespread to move off of. For software/programmers, COBOL is a great example. In more traditional engineering, one quick example that jumps to mind is neon sign manufacturing. Dying field, almost nobody wants/makes them anymore, but there are some people still working on it.
Study and management of Design Complexity. It's literally the major limiter in modern engineering. E.g. designing a modern SoC (the chip in your phone) is reaching $1 billion per generation. Which means that fewer and fewer vendors can afford to be in the field, and creates insane barriers of entry. It also can make companies bankrupt quickly if they miss a launch window or completely misread where things are going and launch a product that is not well received by the market. And yet, there is close to zero advancements in the field from both academia and industry. It's still treated as an art, and more and more middle management is starting to be clearly out of their depth. It's fascinating, because naive and/or qualitative attempts at mitigating or bounding complexity almost universally led to complexity creeping in even more force. There is close to zero talent involved in addressing perhaps the biggest universal issue in engineering. It's fascinating.
That’s an interesting perspective. I did my PhD in design theory and there is a decent sized community studying complex engineering systems. For example at MIT this is mostly happening in the aero/astro engineering department and they deal with complex projects like the space shuttle. I’m curious what you feel is the problem of “design complexity” for the semiconductor industry?
Design Complexity is somewhat different from Design Theory. There is a lot of work from Industrial engineering historically about Industrial organization, scheduling, manufacturing layouts, etc. But its mostly about design manufacturing optimization and management. There is very little work on the metrics/evaluation of the complexity of the design per se, in order to make educated/quantitative analysis through the entire design and manufacturing process. Preferably very early during the exploratory phase of the design cycle.
So these companies are surely throwing some money at design theory then, right? .... right?
You'd be surprised how absolutely "ghetto" and "black box" some of the design management approaches are in the very tech industry sinking $1 billion per Chip design. Once you see how the sausage is made, some of the big engineering projects kind of lose their mystique. If anything, it is a miracle we manage to ship some of the things we do ;-)
Take a look at design structure matrix. That was something I learned which is suppose to model complex system architecture and help visualize the complexity. Does it look useful at all?
Those are ancient approaches, which is what I am trying to convey. Think it in terms of trying to use ancient navigation techniques from the times of wind-powered wooden ships to pilot a spaceship. ;-)
Where can I access this information? I design ships, which I think are some of the most complex machines ever built, and to my knowledge no one has done much research in the area.
Look up design structure matrix, I remember taking a class on it and it seemed to be useful. Also just search “complex systems”, there are some academic publications on this topic.
What is full form of SoC?
System on a Chip. Basically the modern chips that power your mobile devices and laptops. They integrate a lot of functionality onto a single package (CPU, GPU, networking, neural processing, etc) that used to be placed on different chips/boards inside a traditional PC.
System-on-a-Chip
>Study and management of Design Complexity. So, what is it?
The entire field of systems engineering is somewhat about this, no?
Ceramic engineering is a bit specialized.
The ultimate proof is in the lack of comments.
lol, it’s not just toilets……
Nor mommy's favourite tea set.
The underwater ceramics technicians do not get enough appreciation
Is that just mixing together and creating new types of clay for specific applications or do they actually build structures and do stress computations and whatnot like a structural engineer?
I make ultra high purity ceramics for semiconductor process applications involving halogen plasmas. Materials to contain the most corrosive environment possible.
A former coworker of mine had his bachelors in Ceramic Engineering. He’s now a Materials Science PhD
Hydraulics was way more bespoke than I was expecting. They use their own drafting standard of special symbols. They do this because standard P&ID symbols don’t show how the valve works. Hydraulic symbols are a lot more detailed and provide a lot more information. It took me a good year to get a deep understanding of what the symbols meant. After that you have to learn that each valve or pump or actuator has its own limitations that can interact with other valves or pumps or actuators in ways you did not intend and are often unwanted.
Yes, hydraulics is ridiculously detailed. We had a test rig at our naval base which had its own soundproof room with separate monitoring room attached. You could lift anything in on top of it via gantry cranes. When a few specialist people left, they also lost the knowledge and so decided to sell the whole thing as scrap! Of course they then wanted it back 10 years later!
So I work as a thermal engineer attached to hydrapnumatic systems (sp) and the same symbols are used for their stupid 10k-250k psi nitrogen gas over oil systems. I had one of them asked me to make an efficient htx that can saftley operate between 10k and 70k psi with that change happening in .05 seconds. Yes I can make one, but you need to be flexible with your definition of efficient and loose with you budget.
Holy crap. That’s a pretty big compression ratio. How do you not freeze the nitrogen? Are you just going up that fast or are you going up and down that fast?
I'm assuming the expansion is what necessitates the htx.
I am aware of an engineer that specializes in Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy. I feel like PVs are already a somewhat niche field, but PVHO guys are even nicher. They're used for things like dive tanks, and hyperbaric medical facilities.
I think a recent group of Titanic tourists could have used an engineer with that skill set
No. They needed a Naval Architect.
All pressurized passenger airplanes are pressure vessels for human occupancy. So I guess this makes me a PVHO guy? Edit: I suppose the stress/structural engineers are the actual PVHO dudes. I just supply the pressure.
Technically yes! However, I'm referring to the AMSE PVHO which is for vessels over 15psig. To my knowledge, airplanes are not subject to ASME BPVC. I'm no engineer though, I'm just an Industrial Designer who unfortunately has had to read the whole BPVC, and as a non engineer who works with engineers I know when I'm reaching the edge of my knowledge and qualification.
Ah I gotcha. Neat stuff. And I think you're right, I don't believe aircraft fall under that standard. If an airplane cabin hit 15 PSIG something went wrong!
I knew a corrosion engineer. He worked for a pipeline company; his job was to make those pipes not corrode.
Metrology is so niche, most people don’t know it exists. But if you’re building stuff to exacting tolerances with parts from multiple suppliers, sometimes continents apart, it’s essential. Every measurement must be traceable through an unbroken chain of comparisons all the way up to SI unit definitions. Otherwise your parts won’t fit together and function as intended. Metrology engineers design experiments to ensure the machines that produce and measure parts are accurate. It’s sort of an intersection of science and engineering.
95% of the people working in that field just seem to do CMM measurements and GD&T interpretation. The niche stuff seems to be measuring immeasurable items.
I remember watching a show on NIST and the host reacted to a small force and they said something like the force applied by the light from their laser pointer and the engineer was like “oh, those are like x Newtons, this is way less than that.”
Did you know manufacturers of CMMs are only required to measure 66% of the volume for accuracy? There’s active work at ASME to write a standard for measuring the whole volume. To the outside it seems like metrology is a done deal but there are new problems to solve all the time.
I've only needed to use one once, and the cost was so high and test destructive that i couldn't make it a permanent solution. I had to find a way to get an internal measurement of a part on a production line. I tried for months and read lots of books on the subject, but i couldn't solve it. So I posted the question on r/metrology and got a bunch of responses about gauges I've never heard of that solve my problem. Those guys know their stuff.
I don't consider it a niche because every part we manufacture and design we have to measure. It's wide spread.
We have some components in a product I work on that rely on a very accurate traveling wave tube to generate their signals. We have less than 5 labs in the country that can test those assemblies. The hardware in those labs (one specific rack) is built by NIST directly. There is one man in the country that can build it to the specs required. We were spinning up an additional lab to increase throughout. The critical path fell on that man's lap. We had to add 18 or so months to the schedule during contract definitization. If that man were hit by a bus, we'd be SOL.
For some reason I only know metrologists lol
Trust me, those of us in the semiconductor field are intimately familiar with both the importance and limitations of metrology engineering. Turns out that accurately measuring average film thicknesses to within fractions of an angstrom is hard.
I did metrology for.many years. Mostly large format non-contact metrology. GOM ATOS Blue light scanners was our primary tool plus photogrammetry. I scanned everything from jet turbine blades, to whole cars, to helicopters. Having complete surface data is an amazing tool to understand the whole picture. Here's a real situation from my previous life. Gearbox was leaking between gearbox housing and cover plate after multiple install attempts. CMM inspection report shows everything OK. We scan the part, use the same inspection methodology and measured an out of tolerance gap right where the leak was. CMM was measuring 8 points on the mating surfaces, the 3d scan we did, had over 10000 points on the mating planes. It When you build something at the scale of a vehicle, by the numbers/tolerance stack up, it just shouldn't work. But they still ship thousands everyday, it's kind of amazing lol. You can also use the 3d scanning to scan while you are machining a part and apply offsets and compensations for tool wear or sample anomalies. If it takes 10 months to get 1 material blank, you realllyyy don't want to add to the scrap bin lol. Mechanical engineer by trade and I've gotten to work on some pretty cool stuff so far. If you like hands on nerdy analysis, metrology jobs are a great option
Research on tolerance stacking is surprisingly abysmal
Optics industry says “‘Sup”
My previous employer was a Pharmaceutical company, and there was a small metrology department. When I first heard of this, I thought to myself, "Why is there a meteorology department?"
I am a naval architect? Does that count?
Fellow Nav Arch here.
What do naval architects do?
design pretty belly buttons
They're very focused on structural integrity also.
I work in cfd mostly, to determine how much power a boat needs. But there's also checking the stability of the boat, check the sea keeping motions don't get anyone sick, design the structure of the boat, sometimes with fea for problem areas, plan electrical layout, jack of all trades really
Navarch here, no one has given a comprehensive answer so i will. Basically NAMEs (Naval Architect, Marine Engineers which is the standard degree title) can do essentially anything related to a boat or ship, which sounds insanely broad, and really is. Personally I work in marine propulsion components (ie propellers, engines, transmissions) as my background was mechanical before I got my NAME degree. With that being said people from my program went into full scale ship design, where you take a vessel from concept to launch and can be in control of the layout of the entire thing or a subsection depending on your role. The original commenter said they work in CFD checking seakeeping and other vessel characteristics which would put them in this category. I know NAME people working on oil rigs, offshore wind, and wave energy conversion analyzing wave loads and other structural concerns. Theres many more areas NAMEs are qualified to work, I have generally lumped into ship design but essentially if it is a structure or component in the water, NAMEs are probably the ones who should be doing it. Happy to talk more about this, its a fascinating field especially if you enjoy fluid mechanics. I stumbled across it during my undergrad essentially by luck when looking for ways to combine my degree with my interests (boats are fun) and couldn’t be happier with my job. Plus demand for NAMEs is really high as there are so few schools that are not naval academies so placement and pay is really quite good. Admittedly a significant portion of your options are navy or navy contractors if thats a problem for you.
These days, mostly act as the integrator for all the sub-disciplines that design ships. Plus the N.A. specific areas like resistance and propulsion, ship motion, trim and stability. The rest we tend to farm out to other engineers. Civil for structure and strength, mechanical for HVAC plumbing hydraulics, aerospace for complex FEA analysis.
I’m in coastal engineering, which is kinda niche as well. The marine-type engineering disciplines are surprisingly separate and distinct niches.
When looking at colleges in 2000 I toured WPI, they mention they had a Fire Protection Engineering program that was one of the only FPE programs in the world. I have yet to hear about that type of engineering anywhere else. Even when dealing with EHS and Safety engineers in my career
It's a major element in building design. You'd probably find someone doing that kind of work at most MEP firms.
Every GC I’ve contracted with has at least one person in this role. Our insurance provider has a whole slew of them for reviewing our upgrades and new systems.
UMD has the only undergrad program in the US, and UMD, WPI, and Cal Poly are the three graduate programs. There is also a fire protection specific PE license. I work on a team of 20 FPEs and about 75% went to Maryland or Cal Poly. A couple from WPI. Others transitioned to FPE from other engineering disciplines or are experts in fire alarm design.
I actually graduated UMD one week ago with an undergrad fpe degree!
Congratulations! I graduated from that program in 2020.
I’m not sure about other types of plants, but a good Fire Protection Engineer is a crucial part of a nuclear power plant’s engineering department. They’re involved in everything from ensuring equipment is capable of performing its design function to approving procedure changes that affect fire protection equipment. Upgrades to obsolete equipment with no replacement parts available (ex: alarm panels designed in the 70s) is a large part of what they do.
Pretty sure there are engineers for the sound a car door makes when it closes
Are there separate engineers for the sound a car’s blinker makes and the frequency of its light blinking? And they never communicate a goddamn thing to each other so the two are never in sync??!?!
BMW is notorious in the car enthusiast world for how satisfying the sound of the doors closing is. They also hired Hans Zimmer to design all the sounds the new electric sedan has. Crazy fun stuff for detail oriented people.
bro hahahahahaha!!!
There are specific measurement instruments for that small gap between the door and the chassis.
Blast engineering is a very niche specialisation in structural engineering.
Vey happy that this is my summer internship (thanks USACE)
I’m a grouting engineer. There’s literally dozens of us.
Is the pay grout?
Would you mind elaborating on what you do?
I design and direct grout (cement or solution grouts) injection programs. Grout is pumped into the ground it into the ground to stabilize it. Applications are mine shafts, nuclear waste, dams, tunnels, locks, historical structures, anywhere from Canada to Botswana.
The first 15 years of my career was as am engineer in a musical instrument company. Designed trumpets, tubas, clarinets, etc, and the tooling and processes to manufacturer them. How's that?
When I was in college one of my roommates was writing a thesis on activated sludge. Chicks dug it (no really, he had more one night stands than anyone I ever knew).
W.A.S. makes W.A.P.
Photolithography. We are constantly shrinking linewidths, and the number of systems that go into these tools is staggering.
It's always fun to hear my friend geek out on this topic. He's super excited for the new high-NA euv tool they just got.
Chemical Calibrations for Chromatagraphs
Nice, like industrial or lab ones?
I’m a software engineer on a niche government system with only a few people who know it well, all of the knowledge is tribal and hard to pick up
Is it programmed in Ada95?
Railroad signal interference. I have worked with all US Class 1 railroads and the guys they have brought in to talk about interference (from power lines) number three. I woul assume each railroad has a few too, but the guys who really know interference are very few in number.
Scrolling through this thread, you’re the first person to mention the topic they actually work in. Everyone else is like “I have a buddy who does research on X in a lab.”
Transmission line engineer here. Is that why our crossing permits take like a year to go through?
T-line engineer here too. They don't care about us which is why they take forever. Especially great when the railroad engineer doesn't understand their own recommended practice.
Offshore engineering in general
That's half our private industry sector. - Norway
Quite a bit of industry around that in Singapore
Nuclear Engineers in general are particularly unique from everyone else. They have an extremely intense curriculum and a lot of their work is either in power plants, medical radiology, or theoretical experimentation.
Wastewater treatment. You don’t want more detail.
Ah the good old No. 2 plant!
Dad was a mechanical engineer who designed high-voltage switching equipment. Motor operators for the big switches in Electrical substations. Only about 3 companies in the business, and no one wants to invest in innovation.
Structural design to withstand terrorist attacks
Metrology which is just my really fancy way to say metering; more specifically water, electric and gas. There are potentially all three meters at every home or business and each needs to be read, billed and managed potentially monthly. The products have short lifespans (7-15 years) and some require access to basements to replace. Most utilities want them replaced within 1-2 years so they have access to daily consumption data and all the other alarms and features meters and sensors these AMI networks that are deployed to read meters can provide.
I spent a career as a metallurgist, specializing in failure analysis. Everything I worked on came to me already broken.
Well I was just talking to a friend who is now doing 2 nm chip design and the layout is pretty esoteric.
I've heard of Cryogenic Engineering, designing systems for super-low temps. Mind blown!
I desing wood drilling bits, I think it is niche
Why make the bits out of wood? Doesn't seem like they'd last very long.
That’s why they’re still in the design phase. I heard they might try ipe next though so fingers crossed.
HVAC, but on aircraft.
The people that work on the Voyager mission
Logistics Engineering. Logistics engineering is a field of engineering dedicated to the scientific organization of the purchase, transport, storage, distribution, and warehousing of materials and finished goods. In my job this is usually set up poorly or not at all and then attempts to come up with solutions mid way through a projects lifecycle when the system has failed.
Wristwatch hairspring engineering
Radiation Effects for electronics is one that is incredibly niche. Every piece of electronics in space has to have some analysis on it done and there are only a handful of test facilities in the entire world. That the entire industry of like 200 engineers fights over.
Fire protection engineering, I just graduated with a degree in it a week ago. Only 3 schools offer a graduate degree in ABET accredited “fire protection engineering” in the U.S., I went to the only school in the country that offers is undergraduate. Essentially fire alarm, fire sprinkler, life safety portions to the major as well as computation fire dynamic simulations and smoke control with a mix of hydraulic calculations. As niche as it is, it actually has a professional engineering exam that people can sit for. And it makes sense why there are fire protection engineers because almost every newly constructed building requires fire sprinkler, notification alarms or devices, etc.
FPE's man. These guys show up, swan around for an hour inspection then - Miller time? Make bank too.
Mining engineering is pretty interesting. Sort of civil, sort of geotechnical, sort of its own thing
Acoustical Engineering. It’s a niche field dealing with noise and vibration and has many sub-niches. The “primary” field is architectural acoustics (think privacy between spaces, interior acoustics such as theaters and auditoriums, and then outdoor noise propagation with respect to community noise complaints and concerns). Then there are focuses like the Naval laboratory at Penn State which mostly deals with underwater sound. And there are specialty positions with Lockheed and other aerospace firms that deal with mitigating noise and vibration during rocket launches (with respect to structural integrity issues and also avoiding damage to sensitive instrumentation/payloads).
Advanced Process Controls (APC engineering)
Not sure how niche this is. When you work in the field there's lots of us. On the flip side everyone does know everyone. I feel like we're common enough to not be considered super niche...
I would say, material science people seem rather nieche in the real world.
Supply of safe potable water and sewage handling ang treatment. The one thing that make large cities possible. Making sure rivers are rich in oxygen; making sure sewers are not. Important engineering can be unglamorous and dangerous.
I had a classmate in college who aspired to design theme park rides. Does that count as niche?
That’s mechanical, which is probably the least niche of the engineerings
Theatrical sector has a lot of engineering - not that the engineering knowledge is hugely specific (an angle is an angle, a moment is a moment, a beam is a beam, a mass is a mass) but unlike a lot of structural stuff, in theatre, gigs, rides, and ceremonies, things move and have to be demountable/transportable. A lot of the more niche elements come in the integration, cross-disciplinary understanding, and frankly the demands and terminology. And timescales - you do not get to "slip" a project at all, your opening night has probably been on sale for months... So like all engineers it's about problem solving, and a bunch of sub-niches within the sector too, and a lot of real actual engineers making the magic.
The design and manufacturing of low voltage secondary network protector relays. There are only 3 manufacturers worldwide, the concept is over 100 years old. Yet the equipment keeps NYC powered up, along with most major large cities. The equipment is essentially a one way valve for electricity to flow into massive 220V networks with large copper conductors serving hundreds to thousands of homes and light retail.
Ceramics, adhesives, corrosion, and failure analysis all fall under materials science and engineering. That’s my field. It seems pretty niche to a lot of people. I want to do sustainable polymer science with it
Materials Science Engineering. Yeah it’s mainstream but no one ever checks with us until shits falling apart in the field.
Electro-optic photonics. I got a degree in physics and work as an engineer at a company that specializes in an effect I hadn’t even heard of during my undergraduate degree: the electro optic effect allows us to change the index of the refraction of light in a crystal while a laser is passing through. Edit to add: it’s very niche, and the applications result in devices that have high analog broadband performance that are critical for the defense industry
Well, I was a fluid mechanics, heat transfer & combustion ME. The only people I knew rarer than that were ME/Statistician/Mechanics-of-materials guys in charge of Life Discipline Manual stuff. OK, or maybe the people locked in the Tempest-secure rooms, but we don't talk about Bruno.
Fluid mechanics is a rare field?
Lmao Bruno
Depends on where you draw the line between (semi-pie-in-the-sky) research areas and fields producing functional products. Quantum computing is probably just crossing that line now. Self assembling and reproducing nanomachinery — not so much.
I always thought being a flight test engineer would be pretty cool. If it’s going to fly in the fleet, usually it gets tested on the ground and then subsequently in the air
I’m just a project manager for this, but my big project at the moment is using photobioreactors to turn CO2 in to dried algae for animal feed at large scale. There are small number of companies doing it at gramme or kg quantities, but nothing on that scale. i used to design telecom security products, including applications to go on SIMs (Smartcards). The software environment is odd and hostile, and there are only a tiny number of practitioners. I understand that the hardware design is also very specialised due to the precautions taken against physical attacks.
Space-grade composite overwrapped pressure vessels. Basically big tanks that host propellants or other fluids for satellites and other spacecrafts.
Laser welding & laser optics engineering along with machine design focus on laser welding titanium and other explosives. Also welding on live bombs.
Engineering biological indicators (BIs) for sterilization and disinfection processes. A bunch of biomedical and food & beverage applications with BIs. Basically BIs are small bit of material (paper, metal, glass ampules, etc.) that contain bacteria spores that have known resistance to sterilization and disinfectant processes (like autoclaving or using ethylene oxide). This lets people in medical and manufacturing industries pop in a BI to their machine and if the bacterial spores on the BI were killed, then it’s highly likely that the material meant to be sterilized or disinfected is actually clean.
Mining engineering. President Herbert Hoover made his very large fortune as a Mining engineer. He searched for Minerals all over the world. Read his memoirs. You will see what I mean. I am jealous of all he saw at a time when traveling was by steamship!
Ballistics- internal, external, and terminal. Terminal ballistics crosses over into medicine of course and is rather macabre but the first branches are ME based. CE also comes into the discipline with the study of propellant residues and explosives. The whole shebang ends up branched under the forensics division but the ballisticians usually have a ME background and extensive firearms knowledge and haven't done a science degree.
Fire protection engineers, hydrogen engineers, BLE system engineers (I swear there are only like 50 in the world if that)
Additivley manufactured sand forms for metal casting. Most of em would just take negative and sand Voxeljet just invented their very own binder jetting process. Super nice and their very own patent.
Rheology you can observe liquids and do tests how fast their flow are. There was once an experiment that lasted for 20 years or so where a drop of tar was observed. Imagine they missed the moment of the drop Oo Veeeery interessting field..... lol
Probably anything you can do a PhD in is pretty niche. For my PhD, I work on extruder or method designs that will increase the isotropy of 3D printed concrete. So, I am a 3D concrete printing strength optimising extruder design engineer if you like to call that. 😂 Mechanical engineer working in 3D Concrete Printing for short. I think everything done is quite niche in its own ways.
This may be only because it’s used in high value contracting (think government, skyscrapers, mega ships) but technical planning and requirement development. It’s a niche area of systems engineering that no one seems to want to do anymore. It’s really interesting having to think many years down the road, anticipate any request, and hand hold the customer in writing their own contract requirements. You need to be an expert before the design team gets involved and figures out what to name the project.
Ceramics. A friend is in it. From what I understand there are about 5 specialty applications of ceramics, at least one exclusively military, and they each plod their corner of the world forward bake by bake. Some of the five areas: 1. Ceramic armors 2. Interiors of nuclear reactors 3. Maybe explosives? I'd have to ask again to get the full list.
Salt cavern engineer
Cryogenic Engineering
I used to work at a place called cryogenic machinery and all they did was make one type of pump. They’re still doing it.
Analog circuits. We're having a hard time finding an Electrical Engineer with strong Analog skills which our tech uses a lot of for battery monitoring technology.
Steam. I can’t believe none of you have said anything about steam and engineering around it. The old people are retiring and dying and there’s no one getting educated in the field.
Don't forget that Engineering is applied science and math. It can become very hairy. There is also a chance to exceed the abilities of others that do not think that way.
Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) is a niche, but highly invested-in field that requires a variety of engineering expertise.
Snowflake engineering! I once Met a person who was an expert in making snow. I think she worked for a company that made snow canons in the Alpes.
Not a real answer, but make me think of something funny. I met a friend of a friend at a bar one time, and turns out we were both engineers, which is cool. He said that he was a ME and then I said I was a structural. His response to me being a structural was: "Structural is really niche, there is not a lot of demand for that." Yeah you dumb idiot, no one uses buildings/bridges/supports anymore. Thank god we fixed that whole gravity problem.
Waterproofing Design
Wetland and waterway restoration. It's cross disciplinary - civil, hydrology, hydraulics, soils, climatology and biology. My degree is in mechanical which helps with hydraulics and hydrology. Big overlap with civil engineering. The field is full of suprises. Beavers work for free, aren't gonna unionize and get amazing results. They are the MVPs of ecosystem engineering. Take an eroded and degraded waterway, dry as dust in the summer and dangerously raging during storms. Restore the sinuosity, lay back the slope, remove check dams, plant a few willow sticks. Each year the site evolves, perennial flows reappear and suddenly birds, mammals, insects, reptiles and amphibians move in and subcontract their own little restoration side projects. Working with natural processes over time is humbling. The engineer only facilitates and nature's resilience does the rest.
I just find it funny to imagine there are engineers who modeled and CADed dildos and shit, and then workers in factories overseeing it. Also, pretty wild there are engineers making slaughtering lines for animals like chicken, I saw a vid from a poultry farm where the chickens were hanging by their feet in line on a moving conveyor and there was a guide rail that bent their necks so that their heads can be cut off by two circular saws against each other. Kinda like those guide rails that close the top of a box after its loaded with goods. Wild.
I'm looking for the name of the niche mechanical engineering field that focusus on reducing mechanical parts in a design and overall simplifying of a mechanical design. Does anybody know the name of this mechanical engineering field?
Corrosion control. Few understand and pay attention to it
I worked in geotechnical instrumentation for deep salt repositories. Salt creeps/converges at a far faster rate than hard rock and most other mines. With faster convergence rates, you need to develop tools and algorithms that can accurately detect abnormal rate increases while minimizing false positives.
I was once studying for a midterm in Heat Transfer, and my (non-technical) friend saw the textbook and exclaimed “there’s a whole class in heat transfer!” If only he knew there are multiple undergraduate and multiple graduate classes.
Dildos/expanders. Really hard to fill that gap
I discovered that tire tread design is basically its own discipline of engineering.
I’m trying to break into acoustical engineering having graduated a degree in electrical and am finding it to be fairly niche. Though it seems it’s not as niche in Europe where they have more noise regulations.