Water Jets: Concrete Yes, Tunneling Maybe
High pressure water jets are demolishing concrete from bridge and parking decks, faster and at lower cost than by traditional means. The technique is fast becoming an acceptable option....
Investigating Failure
Failure investigations can be adversarial or cooperative, but impartiality, good engineering ethics, and professional responsibility require that the investigator begin with no premature...
Little Bubbles, Big Payoff
Fine poor diffusers often boost the energy-efficiency of aeration in sewage plants by 25-50%. This is important because the combined energy bill of all U.S. municipal sewage plants is...
EPA Municipal Waste Combustion Activities
In many areas of the country, existing municipal waste landfills are reaching capacity. Land for new landfills or expansions is scarce and expensive, and municipalities would generally...
Dioxins and Human Health
Few environmental issues have attracted as much attention and controversy as the dioxins. Considerable expense has been incurred investigating effects in human populations and laboratory...
Risk Assessment and Public Policy
A governmental official charged with making solid waste policy should be careful not to allow the public policy issue to be defined as the determination of the acceptable level of risk...
The Swedish Dioxin Moratorium
Municipal waste constitutes an energy resource but also an environmental problem. In Sweden emissions of dioxines from waste-to-energy plants have triggered a major debate on environmental...
The National Incinerator Testing & Evaluation Program
Environment Canada, under the National Incinerator Testing & Evaluation Program (NITEP), is addressing emissions from municipal energy-from-waste combustion systems. The main thrust...
The Dioxin Situation in West Germany
The public discussion in Germany of the 'dioxin problem' has recently become more rational than it was three years ago. Emotions and hard facts are in a balance...
Wastewater Technology Innovation for the Year 2000
The present state of wastewater technology research is on a decline because of shrinking funds. A national effort by professionals in all sectors of the wastewater establishment is encouraged...
Electronic Gymnastics
Efforts are being made to have all the parties to a project share the same, current information. In order to do so, civil engineering firms are jumping through electronic hoops to get...
Optimization: An Emerging Technology
The technology of formal, numerical structural optimization is neither mysterious nor complex. Software programs are now available for use by engineers who do not have detailed knowledge...
Computer Scheduling: On-Line and On-Time
The Intermountain Power Plant, a coal fired, 761 MW coal fired electrica generating facility, has been completed months ahead of schedule and substantially under budget. Project managers...
CAD Trials
The solo practitioner is, for many reasons, at a disadvantage when it comes to analyzing and selecting CAD system components. Trade magazine how-to articles are generally geared toward...
Worth a Thousand Words
In recent years, microcomputers have grown powerful enough to take over many of the functions that once, only a mainframe could understand. In addition, they have added a few tricks of...
Planning by Database
Denver's Stapleton International Airport cannot handle the growing volume of air traffic and will be replaced by an entirely new $3 billion Denver Metropolitan International...
Lawyer on a Microchip
Construction in the 1980s have become a complex, high stakes, intensely competitive business. For architects and engineers involved, the prospect of lawsuits has grown tremendously. An...
Predicting Equipment Failure
At Cleveland's Westerly Water Pollution Control Center, the physical/chemical plant for treating wastewater is one of the largest of its kind, with 50 mgd average capacity....
Computers: What Do Students Need to Know?
This article is based on interviews with three professors at three universities, a recent graduate from each school, and the graduate's employer. The interviews show that...
Automating Bridge Design
To avoid some of the pitfalls of manual design calculations, Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas engineers designing a series of bridges for a $280 million section of the New...
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