Civil Engineering Photos

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Seen here is the renovation of the University of California – Berkeley football stadium. Due to the spread out nature of a stadium type construction site, four tower cranes are needed to gain access to the project in its entirety. When dealing with tower cranes in this density great care must be taken to ensure that the booms of each crane do not interfere with each other. This is done with a combination of offsetting the height of each tower cranes as well as constant communication between the operators and the personal on the ground via radios.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

The piece of equipment pictured above is a loader and is standard among most job sites in the United States and around the world. It is typically used to move earth, sand, or gravel around a construction site. The current configuration of this machine, however, has forks to load thinks such as pallets or pieces of equipment onto and off of the back of trucks or around the construction site. Forks like these are adjustable and can be widened or narrowed to fit different objects. When the operator is finished using the forks he can simply switch the forks out for a bucket and begin to move scoopable materials again. The ability to switch tools of the loader makes it one of the most versatile machines used in construction today.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

This is a powerful tool known as a concrete chainsaw. Working on the same principle as a wood chainsaw it is very capable of cutting through concrete, asphalt, and rock materials. This particular unit is powered by hydraulic fluid being pumped through the hoses coming out of the handle on the right side of the unit. Saw chains for this unit are many times laced with diamond grit cutting heads and are very effective at cutting through tough materials. Concrete chainsaws are particularly good at making square cuts, because unlike circular concrete saws they don’t have to cut past the edge of the hole to complete the cut.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Seen here is an extremely valuable piece of equipment to many home owners who have septic tanks across the country. This machine empties the septic tank of its built up solids via a hose from the back end of the truck. Emptying the solids is important to do every two to three years to maintain proper septic tank function for an ordinary family home. The solids are then delivered to a local waste water treatment plant for disposal in the manner that ordinary municipal waste is dealt with.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Seen here is a D6R Caterpillar track-type tractor, or in construction terms, a dozer. Dozers are used for pushing soil material around construction sites, light soil compaction jobs, and many other tasks in the construction, mining, and logging industries. Dozers are known for their ability to be used in almost any terrain thanks to the crawler tracks they use for movement. As can be seen here, the dozer is working in a wet clay filled soil material that is very prone to bogging down traditional wheel vehicles and is doing just fine.

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

Seen above is a material handler at a metal scrap metal yard. This material handler is in a special category of handlers that are called magcranes. This is due to the fact that it uses a magnet to lift up the metal. The magnet is the round brown colored disk hanging from the red boom. The operator has the ability to turn the magnet on and off, and thus pick up and drop off ferromagnetic metal loads.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Featured above is an excavator fitted with a claw for demolition. A machine with this type of configuration is very versatile for demolition purposes. The claw can be manipulated quite accurately for pulling pieces of a structure down or for sorting material on the ground into piles for easier disposal and recycling.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

This is a stack of wood I-Joists used to span long distances between supports in a wood frame structure. Wood I-Joists are typically made of solid wood flanges, the two fat outer parts top and bottom, and an OSB (oriented strand board) web, the skinny center part. I-Joists like this are advantages because they carry load more efficiently than a comparable solid wood member, are lighter than a comparable solid wood member, and can be ordered in spans that would be prohibitively expensive to for solid wood members. This job is using wood I-Joists to prop up form work for a large concrete job, and is thus going to make full use of the dozens of I-Joists bundled here.