This installation of Civil Engineering’s Infrastructure Solutions series, which looks at how civil engineers are using cutting-edge techniques to resolve the issues identified in ASCE’s 2017 Infrastructure Report Card, examines the nation’s energy system. The United States’ transition from traditional fossil fuel and nuclear sources to other sources of renewable energy has significant implications on transmission and distribution infrastructure — both on land and...
Exploratory engineering course at Northern Essex Community College offers students an introduction to the field. Simulation software has been the key to this class's success.
In creating this modern mental health center, the design team had to balance maximum security and patient care while also facing challenging site conditions and program requirements.
The Nixon Forensic Center is an interesting combination of a health facility and detention center. The state of Missouri and WSP worked together to provide an environment in which patients would not feel as though they were in a typical incarceration environment. This had to be combined with consideration for the security and safety of patients and staff.
Each of the six main living units...
The design and construction of the new Nixon Forensic Center represented big changes for the site of the new psychiatric hospital—both in terms of the modern facilities that were planned and the changes that were necessary to prepare the physical site for those facilities. Most dramatically, the site featured a 60 ft drop in elevation from its high end on the northeastern edge of...
FOR ENGINEERS with several decades of experience, the current economic crisis wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic is, in some ways, a familiar challenge. Experienced engineers who weathered the economic downturns of the early 1990s; the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; the Great Recession caused by the financial crisis of 2008; and other national and international crises have learned from the past.
Yet...
ENGINEERS, architects, and other designers are rapidly working with health-care experts on a range of efforts to help expand the nation’s supply of hospital beds. These endeavors are in addition to those being undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is converting several public spaces into care facilities in some of the United States’ hardest-hit cities.
One of the chief emerging strategies involves...
THE FULL IMPACT of the COVID-19 global pandemic on the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry will not be known for many years. Yet it is already clear that many construction projects are experiencing partial delays or full stoppages as the pandemic spreads across the globe. In North America, associations and companies have organized surveys and created tools to help the AEC industry better...
