Photo courtesy Nitto Construction Co. In a departure from traditional rebound hammer designs, a test hammer developed by a Japanese construction firm has a built-in accelerometer to provide a baseline for its calculations. An electronic concrete test hammer, developed by a Japanese construction company looking to improve non-destructive testing tools, is now available in the U.S. market along with a stateside product representative.Nitto Construction Co. Ltd., Monbetsu-gun, Hokkaido, Japan, began to develop the hammer after concrete delaminated and fell in the Sanyo high-speed rail tunnel in 1999.The company was dissatisfied with testers based on the widely used rebound design developed
Image courtesy of Multivista Photographers integrate with the project team at an early stage to identify 'hot spots' in the plan and schedule. They then visit the jobsites on a regular basis to document the put-in-place work. They link the images to the plans on a web-accessible archive for the project team. A company founded by a former electrical subcontractor is successfully franchising a service to integrate digital photos with construction documents to create indexed, interactive construction databases.Multivista, Vancouver, British Columbia, sends photographers to capture project details in high-resolution images using high-end cameras and wide-angle lenses that can frame large
U.S. Dept. of Energy laboratories are finishing up work on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stimulus-funded infrastructure work that could accelerate research for breakthroughs in energy, medicine and other areas. However, transferring that research and development to the marketplace poses challenges. Image courtesy Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Electrical upgrades will help power accelerated magnetic fusion experiments at DOE's plasma physics laboratory in Princeton, N.J. The Princeton lab received nearly $14 million in stimulus funding. Photo courtesy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Construction is nearly complete on a research building at DOEs Fermi lab in Illinois that expands R&D
Recent rendering of one of LightSquared's satellites Related Links: GPS Industry Groups Reject LightSquared's Network Fix FCC Announces Comment Period for TWG GPS Industry Groups Reject LightSquared's Network Fix The gloves are off in a standoff between the U.S. Global Positioning System industry and a satellite communications vendor seeking to light up a broadband satellite and terrestrial network to blanket the country.GPS interests say plans for the satellite and terrestrial voice and data network with 40,000 base stations will operate too close to GPS on the spectrum and cause damaging interference to the entire system. They accuse the vendor of
Construction industry players and other major users of precision Global Position Systems (GPS) say a new report released by an industry working group today confirms that a wireless broadband network proposed by LightSquared would cause major harm to most GPS equipment in use around the globe. Rendering of LightSquared's latest satellite. Related Links: FCC Announces Comment Period for TWG Report Save Our GPS Coalition Press Releases LightSquared's Press Release Efforts 'To Save Our GPS' Heat up in Congress The group also rejected a three-pronged proposal put forth by Reston, Va-based LightSquared, which it says would mitigate any interference the company's
Construction industry players and other major users of precision Global Position Systems (GPS) say a new report released by an industry working group today confirms that a wireless broadband network proposed by LightSquared would cause major harm to most GPS equipment in use around the globe.
A fight over a 4G network and competitor to the Global Positioning System is heating up in Washington, as a coalition that includes major construction industry groups and heavy-equipment manufacturers is trying to block a move by LightSquared, Reston, Va., to launch a wireless broadband network. An industry group called the Coalition to Save Our GPS contends that the LightSquared plan would involve building some 40,000 ground stations and create interference with the existing GPS signals, which would disrupt systems such as high-precision GPS used in dredging operations in U.S. ports, as well as GPS that is used to guide
Georgia Institute of Technology professor Charles M. Eastman, long considered a research guru for computer-based building design and construction, displays parental pride in his latest brainchild: Georgia Tech's Digital Building Laboratory. Unlike Eastman's past efforts, starting some 40 years ago, the fledgling DBL, created in 2009 to help improve building design and construction through the aid of digital tools, is a collaboration among academics and players in the buildings-sector food chain. “This is industry and academia together,” says Eastman, DBL's director and a professor of both architecture and computing at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. “To me, it is so obvious that
Everyone in the A/E/C industry uses email to manage the multifaceted communications that zip back and forth among key players on design and construction projects. But tracking emails and searching for key discussion threads amid complex, far-flung projects has become even more difficult in an era of overloaded in-boxes. Mail Manager, an email plug-in that works with Microsoft Outlook, claims to offer unique features to ease the process of tracking, filing, searching and organizing project communications for A/E/C firms. Built by Arup’s Oasys Software division, Mail Manager has been on the market for more than six years. But recent improvements
An infrastructure construction software vendor, who specializes in design and analysis applications, is working to have it both ways. As a privately held company, Bentley Systems Inc., Exton, Pa., is not required to file statements with securities regulators, as publicly traded companies must do. But not filing means Bentley misses the PR bang that comes when annual statements are released by its publicly traded competition. So on March 2, Bentley held its first “annual report” conference call with analysts and investors, as well as trade journalists, to proclaim successes, announce new business moves and reiterate some announcements of the preceding