By Josh Zimmerman Project teams are beginning to integrate services inhouse, including steel fabrication, to optimize overall cost and shorten timelines. In the past, the steel fabricator hired a detailing firm, who then created its own model and set of drawings.…
Keeping Ocean Shores Clean: Coastal Town Relies on Vacuum Sewers
By Steve Gibbs Some public works officials and civil engineers think twice when considering vacuum sewer technology as a viable alternative for municipal…
Engineered Solutions: Topographic LiDAR Data Employed to Map, Preserve U.S. History
By Michael Meiser and Daniel Ngoroi In August 2015, the National Park Service (NPS) contracted Woolpert for the Little Bighorn National Monument Mapping…
Safety Still First! BIM Takes Rule No. 1 to the Next Level
By John Turner As the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry evolves, with new technologies leap-frogging our capabilities forward and shifting our approach to managing projects, there’s no aspect of the jobsite left untouched—and that…
Better BIM: Laser Scanning Improves Accuracy and Speed in Onsite Data Acquisition
By Chew Beow Kwan Building information modeling (BIM) first came about in the 1970s, but its methods have been refined considerably since then. Widely used by city planners, architects and civil engineers today, BIM enables stakeholders to better make high-impact…
GRAVITY: It Just Works—Massive Concrete Blocks Resolve Detention-Basin Challenges
By Angus W. Stocking, L.S. Houston’s Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone No. 17 is clumsily named, but its mission is admirably clear: per the organization’s website, TIRZ 17 is a “local government corporation created to aid, assist and act on behalf of…
Sponsored Content: One Forest, Multiple Perspectives
By Mary Jo Wagner With nearly 60 percent of the country––23 million hectares (56.8 million acres)––covered in trees, forestry in Sweden is big business. The world’s second-largest exporter of paper, pulp and sawn-wood products, Sweden’s forest…
Engineered Solutions: Tricky Feedmill Site Requires Stormwater Conveyance System
By Bart Hartsfeld and Chris M. Ross, P.E. After acquiring Durbin Farms, Mar-Jac Poultry Alabama LLC planned a major expansion to build a new $25 million feedmill in Franklin County, Ala., that would efficiently provide feed to poultry growers in the region. Unfortunately,…
InfraWorks 360 Is Growing Up: From Conceptual Tool to Detailed Design, InfraWorks Adds Engineering-Grade Features
Since its initial release a few years ago, Autodesk InfraWorks 360 (IW360) has been received as an interesting software-development exercise in what a BIM application for infrastructure could look like, with some promising but limited functionality. Some robust…
Proceed with Caution: Concrete Cloth GCCM Provides Erosion Protection at Nuclear Power Plant
A nuclear power-plant site in the southeastern United States faced an erosion problem on a steep, 2:1 slope near dry-cast storage containers of spent nuclear fuel. The shotcrete finish covering the slope was intended to serve as a protective layer that would…
