125th Anniversary of the Tay Bridge

This evening I attended a special lecture organised by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the completion of the Tay Bridge.

Duncan Sooman, a celebrated civil engineer, from Network Rail was the speaker for the evening end enlightened us on not only the history of the Tay Bridge but on the repairs and maintenance of the bridge today.

Being very involved in the project, our speaker was able to take us from the initial conception of the maintenance project, through procurement and tender, to what is happening right now in the ongoing project including looking at the problems that are currently being faced.

I found this really interesting as I could directly relate it to a piece of coursework I am currently in the process of completing as part of my Construction Management module. I am completing an appraisal of the construction management during the New Wembley Stadium project, and it really was refreshing to hear of a current project where so much detail is being put into the management of the project.

Overall the talk was really inspiring. I really felt the relevance of my current coursework to my future career.

Transatlantic Travel

Imagine being able to travel from London to New York in 54 minutes. Now if someone said that to me, I'd say it must be impossible, but I've found out that this isn't the case! A model has been made that shows that high speed transatlantic travel is actually possible, in the form of a magnetic train within a floating vaccum pipeline.

Futuristic engineering is a real interest of mine, and to find out that this is possible has blown my mind! It's projects like this that I dream of working on in the future.

This is an image courtesy of http://dsc.discovery.com which shows how it is imagined the project would work.

You can find more about the idea at http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/engineering/transatlantictunnel/interactive/interactive.html

Boston's Big Dig

Having a quiet Sunday night in and just looking at some engineering projects and came across 'Boston's Big Dig'. The project interested me as it is extremely cumbersome to be placed in such a big city, such as Boston.

The idea is to bury a lot of the main infrastructure of the city underground and reclaim land on the surface, for parks and added greenery. However, this project isn't as, for lack of a better word, 'simple'. The project encompasses several large projects such as the widest cable stay bridge in the world, the Zakim Bridge, which is 10 lanes wide, and looks pretty stunning!!

The project also includes the Fort Point Channel Crossing, an amazing 11 lane tunnel to cross the channel, that was designed to sit above the existing subway system by a mere 5 metres!! Also included is an Airport Tunnel, 3/4 of a mile long crossing Boston harbour to relieve traffic from the city centre and provide a more efficient and time saving route to travel.

The project really has caught my eye, and I can't believe I'm only finding out about it's exisitance now!! Boston is now another place I just need to visit for its engineering value, and the inspiration it has given me!

Starting Lab Work!

So last week I started on the experimental phase of my project, mainly just getting to know the lab, doing my risk assessment and setting up my experiment.

This is the tank in the lab which I'll be shovelling sand in and out of over for the next few months!

After getting to know all the staff in the lab and getting everything sorted, I had to prepare the bed of the tank.

Firstly as you can see, I created a gravel layer as the base. I then covered the gravel in plain multi-purpose cloths. These cloths acted as a permeable layer on the bed. This helps when I'm adding the element of water to my experiment but also helps when I'm shovelling sand in and out of the tank.

I've also now added the sand to my experiment. It is an incredible fine silica sand. I've also started doing a few trial runs, can't wait to get even further this week and get some good results! Will post more pictures soon!

Honours Project: Multi Pass and Deep Ploughing Strategies

Hello!

I'm now well into my first semester of fourth year and now my dissertation/project is starting to get interesting.

I'm going to be looking into multi pass trenching, which, in a nutshell, is ploughing soil from the seabed in order to lay a pipeline underneath the surface. There are dangers associated having pipelines sitting on, or above the seabed, such as external loading from fishing and trawling nets and hydrodynamic loading. There is also the risk of movement of the pipeline, by thermal expansion on commissioning. In areas such as polar regions, trenches must be deeper than normal, which isn't possible when ploughing in one pass. Multi pass, is where the trench is ploughed more than once in order to make a deeper trench.


The purpose of my study is to create an original model to investigate the effect of multi pass pipeline ploughing by using experimental results from 1/50th laboratory model testing, as well as creating a tow force prediction model that incorporates multi pass ploughing.
Next wait, I'm starting the experiment phase of the project, can't wait to get into the lab for my first proper original investigation!!

Will post pictures and more from the lab next week!!