Related Links: Spain's Solar Pullback Threatens Pocketbooks China's Moratorium on Solar Produciton Gives Hope Abroad From 2008 to 2012, Hawaiian Electric Company saw solar rooftop system installations double each year. As adoption again nearly doubled in 2013, 10% of the utility's customers had solar systems feeding into its grid. Hawaiian Electric recently announced a temporary slow-down of adding more solar energy onto some of the circuits on its grid. Other U.S. utilities also are imposing deterrents to small-scale solar.Hawaiian residents pay an average of 37¢ per kWh, triple the national average. But a 6-kWh solar installation in Hawaii can produce
Related Links: University at Buffalo's Bridge Engineering Program National Center for Pavement Preservation Two U.S. engineering schools have opened research centers to help bring the nation's infrastructure up to technological speed, but also to train a rising cadre of engineers."Innovation" and "professional development" are bywords at the new $3.7-million Institute for Bridge Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo."There's not a particularly fat pipeline of bridge engineers," says Andrew Whittaker, director of structural and environmental engineering.He says the institute aims to attract talent and develop strategies to help bridges resist natural and man-made hazards outside current design
Researchers at the University of Buffalo measure the corrosion level of a steel-cable strand using a non-invasive monitoring technique, aimed to replace structurally invasive manual checking processes for concrete-embedded steel cables on bridges. “Checking post-tension structures for corrosion is a challenging problem,” says Alireza Farhidzadeh, a University of Buffalo PhD candidate in structural engineering. He says projecting the accurate evolution of corrosion to a cable is nearly impossible because of a variables such as the salting of roads during the winter and the rain and snow levels during the year. Structurally invasive corrosion monitoring techniques are required, such as drilling
Image Courtesy ICC For the first time in ICC history, anyone can submit a proposal to change the building code from anywhere with Internet access. A new web app from the International Code Council makes voting on changes to the building code available to anyone, for the first time.Since its inception, the International Code Council (ICC) held hearings twice a year where members submit, argue and finalize changes to the coming year’s building code. Only a fraction of the council’s 58,000 members are able to attend the meetings—some of which last 10 days—says Dominic Sims, CEO of ICC.“The app is
Courtesy UC3M ROBINSPECT is an automated version of TunConstruct [pictured]. The latter was a manually controlled robotic scanning method for mapping the interiors of tunnel walls. A newly funded intelligent robotic system for tunnel inspection is slated for testing on several large European jobs as early as next December—well before a working prototype is built. Funders’ confidence is based on a successful manual prototype developed by the same researchers.ROBINSPECT (Robotic System with Intelligent Vision and Control for Tunnel Structural Inspection and Evaluation), is a robot developed by a European consortium of schools, led by Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III (UC3M) and
Although Sany and other Chinese manufacturers are coming off a major decade of growth in construction-equipment manufacturing they still face hurdles. Many are struggling to gain ground in North America's $25-billion construction- equipment market amid a glut of Chinese equipment.
ENR’s editors are always on the lookout for new and useful electronics that have the potential to improve the construction workflow. Over the course of 2013, we’ve run across or experimented with a few devices that show promise. Some of them might make it a bit easier to stay connected on the road, while others will be more at home in the office or on the jobsite.Click here to begin the slideshow.
At Facebook Inc.’s sprawling 57-acre campus in Menlo Park, Calif., construction professionals met with Silicon Valley technologists in mid-November to discover ways to improve the AEC industry, all in one weekend.
Related Links: FPDetective Whitepaper Tor Software to Fight Privacy Invasion Belgian researchers are slated to release a free software framework to the public in November that is designed to identify "fingerprinting," a browser-based method of tracing users by tracking features of a specific device, creating a unique ID.In a recent study at the University of Leuven, Belgium, researchers used the framework, called FPDetective, to crawl many popular sites. Results found that more sites use fingerprinting techniques than previously was believed.A device fingerprint is a set of system attributes with a combination of values that are highly likely to be unique
PHOTO Courtesy of TurboCAD TurboSite's Geolocation feature allows users to tag photos and video to site plans and then share the info as a PDF. Related Links: TurboSite The GPS Device that Utility Workers Love TurboSite, an iOS app that leverages a smart device into a field reporting tool, has rolled out a new plug-in that turbocharges the app for Autodesk Revit users.The plug-in for TurboSite uses a device's built-in GPS and gyroscope to collect a user's geographic location and orientation within a structure and tie it to the multimedia collected on an iPad or iPhone."TurboSite was cost-effective and was
