Courtesy Carnegie Mellon University A person's gait, weight and health are contributors to the specific vibration pattern they make as they walk. Related Links: Hae Young Noh assistant professor, Carnegie Mellon University explains her building sensor technology. A new structural-vibration sensor system inspired by scorpions’ predatory habits detects building occupants by their walking patterns. Walking vibrations produce a unique signature pinned to individual occupants.“It helps with building-energy management and to control the HVAC systems, based on occupancy,” says Hae Young Noh, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. The practical application of Noh and her team’s
Image-making technology improves every year and ENR's annual The Year in Construction photo contest is one way to track how that improvement is contributing to improving the construction process, itself.Less than a decade ago our judges started seeing images shot by the then-new GoPro camera. GoPro cameras are now becoming commonplace tools on jobsites and have made it possible not only to capture photo documentation easily, but even to capture inspection photos in difficult-to-reach areas with relative ease. Such photos can reduce risk and improve performance.When the contest began in 2002, film and digital photos sent in by mail on
Architecture Engineering and Construction hackathons bring AEC professionals together with technology developers to turn ideas into proofs-of-concept. All this happens in a weekend of focused collaborative effort. This “hacking” philosophy and approach is a powerful tool to enable the AEC industry to learn how to innovate, by focusing limited resources to quickly develop ideas and solutions. To maximize our hacker approach to innovation, Balfour Beatty tested the concept through several internal and external hackathon-style events and initiatives.Externally, our teams compete at AEC Hackathons, including the most recent AEC Hackathon 1.2 – Seattle, where we collaborated with fellow hackers from Microsoft, Newforma
Courtesy Trimble Navigation Limited Trimble is one of four companies that got an FAA permit to fly unmanned aircraft for commercial purposes. Pictured here is the firm's fixed-wing UX5. Courtesy Trimble Navigation Limited Trimble's UX5 launcher. The Federal Aviation Administration on Dec. 10 issued five permits to four companies to fly unmanned aircraft for commecial purposes. It remains unclear how the permits might branch out.“It’s available to us to be subcontractors with this, but our distribution channel is our strength,” says Todd Steiner, marketing director of geospatial imaging solutions at Trimble, which is the first fixed-wing manufacturer to get issued
Related Links: Water-Mapping Tool May Lead to More Informed Design Decisions Online Options Abound for Electronic File Sharing Yau Lee Group Hong Kong Housing Authority Center for Integrated Facility Engineering Trimble Vico RIB iTwo 5D software Bluescape interactive displays NVIDIA graphical processing units Nasuni storage as a service Panzura cloud storage system Supercharging Structural Design & Construction Productivity Design and construction professionals are seeing a rapid expansion in the hardware, software and services available for collecting and sharing information with distributed teams. The market has exploded with a wide range of effective tools and systems for gathering digital data, exchanging
Related Links: http://kodakpixpro.com/Americas/# http://www.thermal.com/see_the_unseen.html http://www.vsnmobil.com/wearables/v-alrt/ Every fall, electronics manufacturers introduce a flock of new devices to entice consumers. ENR likes to root through the offerings to look for items that might serve the needs of construction. Click the image to begin the slide show.
Aqua AMRSR-E, MetOp ASCAT A computer visualization of the monthly average soil moisture in Australia. Related Links: Surface Soil Moisture Data Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity Data The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is scheduled to launch this January a new satellite to gather soil-moisture data to help predict floods and droughts.NASA’s soil-moisture active-passive (SMAP) satellite joins the recently launched Sentinel-1 satellite, which collects data for the European Space Agency’s soil-moisture and ocean-salinity (SMOS) mission. The SMOS project measures the level of water saturation in the top layers of soil and the concentration of salt in the surface layer of
The following projects all involve ideas that originally came from science-fiction tales. However, many of the projects remain within the realm of possibility and some are on their way to reality.
Geo-engineering, or climate engineering, is still in its embryonic stage of development. Some of the ideas experts are discussing, such as putting lunar glass or metallic reflecting disks into space to reduce the amount of incoming solar radiation, sound like the stuff of science fiction.
The projects we profile in this special section all stretch the limits of what is possible. At first glance, they may seem impossible to build. some of the projects are technically possible to build but may be economically unfeasible.
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