Civil Engineering Photos

Photo Credit: Karl Jansen

The growing number of plane trips in the United States and the world is causing major congestion in the air. In reality there is more than enough space for planes. However, keeping track of all those planes and maintaining the several mile buffer between them as required by the FAA is becoming a challenge for the the antiquated air traffic control system that is currently in place. As a result, work is being done to try and fix this problem by the FAA, NASA, and others. This work ranges from theoretical optimization of the air space for plane trip mapping, to better hardware to track planes so they can fly closer. All this work will be necessary as more and more planes take to the sky in the coming years.

Photo Credit: Karl Jansen

This is your typical traffic light in the USA: red on the top, yellow in the middle, and green on the bottom. The four individual signals are supported by the cantilevered mast arm. Traffic lights are seen all over the world, and help traffic flow safely in multiple directions. The design of the signal processing is done after a complete and thorough investigation of existing traffic flow is completed by a traffic engineer. The traffic engineer uses this information to formulate the optimal combination of light sequence order and timing, so that everybody gets along their way in good time and safely.

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.