Building Over the Golden Gate
Charles Seim discusses the struggles of the original bridge advocates to garner support for the Golden Gate Bridge, an idea which originally met with a considerable amount of public opposition....
Golden Gate Bridge Improvements
The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District engineer talks about improvements made to the Golden Gate Bridge since opening day. Improvements covered include: wind bracing,...
Sound Structure
A new concert hall in Dallas, Tex., has the first acoustical design done with the aid of computer simulations that also dictated the shape of the performance space. Those dictates, in...
Quake Resistant Transport
An approach which begins by assessing the vulnerability of a transportation system's key components can help transportation engineers plan for and limit earthquake damage....
Historic Bridges: Conflict Ahead
The engineer who deals with historic bridges becomes the focus of controversy in the course of determining the existing condition, predicting remaining useful life, and designing the repair...
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...
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...
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...
Expert Systems for Risk Analysis
An explanation is presented on why construction risk analysis can be handled by an expert system computer program. The author offers a prototype construction risk management expert system...
Building Frame Analysis in Basic
Moment distribution has, for the past 30 years, been the most popular method of analysis for statically indeterminate structures. Programmed in Basic for the microcomputer with relative...
Design of Large Steam Turbine-Generator Foundations
This report is a guide for engineers who are responsible for the design and analysis of large turbine-generator foundations. A description of the various components of turbine-generator...
Coastal Sediments
The two-volume Proceedings of Coastal Sediments '87 contain more than 150 full papers delivered at a specialty technical conference of the American Society of Civil Engineers...
Overview of Canal Control Concepts
An overview of terminology and philosophies of canal control, plus brief descriptions of canal automation technologies, is given. The justification given for examining control schemes...
Overview of Financial and Economic Considerations
The financial and economic analyses of plans to rehabilitate and automate irrigation water delivery systems are complex technical exercises that require the expertise of professional economists...
Economic Analysis of Irrigation Rehabilitation Projects
This paper discusses the assessment of the costs and benefits of irrigation rehabilitation and modernization projects. It summarizes the methodology used at the World Bank to assess the...
Penetrative Convection in Mixed Layer Models
While surface heat transfer is important in lakes and reservoirs, solar radiation, which penetrates the water surface and is absorbed in the water column, also exists. In this work, a...
The NOS Experience in Real-Time Measurements of Tidal Currents
NOAA'S National Ocean Service (NOS) uses the term RADS, Remote Acoustic Doppler Sensing, for a new class of oceanographic instruments that uses acoustic backscatter to probe...
Parking Lot Drainage Design: Gainesville, Florida
The construction of a 10-acre (4. 05 ha) parking facility (1,000-car capacity) at the University of Florida during 1984 presented the potential for increasing downstream flooding and for...
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