Photo courtesy of Skanska The MEP manager on a Skanska site in Boston dropped plans for conventional lights and went to LEDs. He sees big benefits and no downsides. New product development takes money, ingenuity and patience. When the product is built around a new technology—such as light-emitting diodes—money, ingenuity and patience are needed in spades."We have learned people really need to play with it and test if for awhile before they believe you," says Daniel Lax, the 31-year-old vice president of business development for a division of his family's plastic injection molding company. In 2008, he branched out from
PHOTO BY TOM SAWYER The first lock is the hardest,but once the locator has your position it will keep up with you in five-minute blinks. The possibility of tracking workers on jobsites by remote sensing got a leg up in October with the release of a new homing device. Through a web browser used by an authorized employee, it can report a worker's location.The PocketFinder Personal GPS Locator is like a GPS-enabled cell phone—without the phone. The device uses global positioning satellites to find its location and a GSM-based cell-phone network to call that location in every five minutes. If
Global changes, such as population growth, rising sea level and energy demand, create challenges for civil engineers. And advances in data sensing, and analysis can help address them—but researchers must concentrate on significant needs to make useful contributions.“We see so many people doing research that doesn't help anyone,” laments Ioannis Brilakis, an assistant professor in civil engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. His research focuses on use of computers and information technology in construction.Inspired by a 2008 survey about engineering challenges for the 21st Century, Brilakis decided to use a scientific approach to identify challenges facing civil engineering that
Engineering researchers are dissecting troves of data about the performance of structures hit by the Japanese tsunami of March 11. One of their sharpest tools is light imaging and ranging scan data. It captures distortion in exquisite detail.“We started talking about this [LiDAR] right after the earthquake,” says Michael Olsen, a professor of geomatics at Oregon State University.Olsen is the terrestrial LiDAR expert on a team convened by the American Society of Civil Engineers to analyze the tsunami's loads and the performance of structures and coastal engineering.The team, coordinating with Japan's Building Research Institute, has sent two missions into the
In the wake of the stunning devastation left by the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tohoku Tsunami, there were teetering remains of scattered mangled structures interspersed with standing, unscathed structures.Japanese and American forensic engineers still are combing the debris and data from the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami to study the forces and suss out how the wounded and surviving structures differ from those that are gone. Now one group, a tsunami loads-and-effects subcommittee sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers, is preparing to publish early next year approximately 350 pages filled with engineering analysis and case studies
A professor of applied mechanics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has borrowed a materials analysis technique developed for the car industry and applied it to pipe failure prediction software for offshore drill rig designs. A first test showed a very close correlation between predictions of fracture patterns in the riser of a sunken drill rig, with video images captured at the scene.Researchers at MIT's Impact and Crashworthiness Laboratory used video from the April 2010 explosion of the drill rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico for the project. They applied techniques used to simulate material deformation in car
if a new $10 hydraulic-flow calculator for the iPhone is any indicator, smart-phone apps are fast becoming the new disrupters of traditional software technology.Flo Hydraulic from Appadana, Baltimore, Md., is powerful, flexible and easy to use. Early adopters say it does just about every kind of hydraulic calculation they can think of, potentially overthrowing other widely used tools in the process.According to the App Store, which gave it a “new and noteworthy” billing, the software does 42 different calculations over 10 structure types. Entry screens are backed up by context-sensitive documentation, including formulae and tables, available at the tap of
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
A first-of-its-kind automatic, multisensor system for finding the safest escape routes in buildings is slated for installation in three Iowa campus structures this fall.
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
