Civil Engineering Photos

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Seen here is a concrete placement boom. The boom is basically a small crane type structure to help hold a pipe filled with concrete with the goal of making the placement of concrete easier. The end of the pipe which is visible in the picture is being controlled by two workers, one in orange and one in florescent yellow, and is depositing concrete in the form work for a large mat foundation. The other end of the pipe is connected to a concrete pump, perhaps in a concrete pumper truck or a stand along pump. These types of booms in various types and configurations are common in large concrete pours.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Pictured here is a before and after pour picture of a steel-reinforced concrete staircase. The picture on the left clearly shows the inner resteel, or rebars, placed on risers in the formwork. The steel in designed to take the tension load in the stair case and also helps to prevent cracking. The bars are placed on risers so they are held in the proper position when pouring. Proper placement within the concrete is crucial to ensure they carry the tensile loads as the designer intended once the concrete has cured. After curing, the wooden forms are removed to be used again on another job. Finally, soil is placed around the structure to support the new steel-reinforced concrete staircase.

Photo Credit: Karl Jansen

This is a great example of a flared concrete column. As you can see, the top of the circular column which supports the above structure is flared in a square section. This allows for a wider (and less dense) distribution of loads from above being transferred to the column.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Above is a concrete placing crew working on a large mat foundation. The workers must coordinate their efforts in order to complete the job before the concrete cures. The workers near the bottom of the page are consolidating the concrete with vibrators. While another worker, not pictured above, gives the initial leveling with a tool called a screed. The final touch for this rough finish job is a broom finish done by the worker in the orange hard hat.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

The blue folded arm on top of the tower is a placement boom off a concrete pump truck. This setup is used to allow better access to the bottom of the excavation for crews pouring concrete in the foundation. By moving the base of the placement boom to a tower, much more range is added to the boom. If you look closely the truck the boom belongs to is next to the excavation on the right side of the photograph. As usual with a concrete pump truck, concrete mixers deposit their concrete into the pump truck which pumps the concrete through a pipe into the boom. The boom then places the concrete anywhere in the bottom of the excavation it can reach.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Many times when using reinforced concrete in civil engineering applications thousands of cubic yards of it are needed. However, concrete usually isn’t made on site for a project, but at a local batch plant. This means it must all be trucked to the site using concrete mix trucks in approximately eight cubic yard batches. Seen here is a line of concrete mixer trucks from a local batch plant waiting to deliver their loads to a job. This pour was over 6 000 cubic yards of concrete and took place in one continuous operation lasting nearly 40 hours.

Photo Credit: Karl Jansen

This is a photo of some strip foundations being placed. Strip foundations are a type of shallow foundation, used when the soil the foundations are placed on is able to support the the loads that are placed on it. Strip foundations are used to support either a line load, such as that from a load-bearing wall, or a series of columns positioned in a line.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

When pouring concrete contractors cannot simply begin or end placing concrete at any given location in a structure during a given pour. Due to many reasons, including rebar placements and concrete’s inability to stick to itself once dry, pours need to be done in a manner that completes a predetermined structural element. In some cases, this means pouring thousands of yards of concrete in one continuous operation for hours and even days. Pictured above is a concrete pumper’s boom working into the night on a 2 000 yard pour, comprised of approximately 200 trucks, that lasted more than 12 hours. In the background of the photograph is the job’s tower crane silhouetted against the setting sun.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Featured above is a classic single span concrete bridge over a small river. The river is a minor branch of the Muskegon River in Muskegon, Michigan close to where it enters Muskegon Lake. Over the course of the lumber boom of the 1800’s this river carried billions of board feet of lumber from the interior regions of the state to the saw mills on the coast of Lake Michigan. These logs were in turn sawed into lumber and used to build homes, buildings, and other timber structures.