Picture this site in San Antonio: The project manager and supervising engineers are finishing a 16-story, 285-unit Embassy Suites Hotel, and they are huddled around an assortment of Windows tablets, iPhones and iPads. They all go online and open folders on their screens linked to a cloud-based shared file. They open a plan of the hotel’s 14th floor. Each person zooms in on separate rooms and creates their own punch list. They flag issues by dragging icons—coded by issue and trade—to the plan, from pallets on screen. Sometimes they hand-write notes and attach them. At any time the users can
When companies take work to the ends of the earth, communication reliability goes out the window, especially in areas struck by wars or disasters. For professionals determined to maintain contact, whatever the conditions, satellite data terminals are the ultimate backup plan. Photo: Tom Sawyer BGAN data terminals, which support voice calls as well as data, love a good view, like the sky to the southeast of Haiti. Related Links: Hot-Linked Sites Bring Data Home On a recent reporting trip to Haiti, I packed a BGAN Explorer 500 Satellite Data Terminal from Inmarsat. It was on loan to ENR so I
Full-scale, 3D simulation is letting physicians and administrators “walk through” a $200-million Raleigh, N.C., campus regeneration project while it is still in the schematic design phase. Image: Courtesy Fullcon Solutions Visualization company offers access to high-end, CAD-driven, life-size, six-sided simulation for designers and clients to use to confer with each other from disparate sites. “It lets them virtually be in the space,” says Andy King, design director at BBH Design, Raleigh, which employed the tool to help its clients understand the planned structure and spatial relationships. “We found it very beneficial,” says Chad T. Lefteris, vice president of support services
Debate over the use of E-Verify—a federal database used for confirming employment eligibility in the United States—turned confrontational at a jobsite in Tullytown, Pa., on Oct. 13. State Rep. John Galloway (D-Bucks County) walked onto a site at the Levittown Town Center and began shooting video while asking the project superintendent about the employment status of bricklayers working that day. “Are there illegals working on this site?” Galloways asks on the video, which was posted by the Bucks County Courier Times. “Do they have papers?” The superintendent, who works for the project’s construction manager, ECS Construction Management, Bethlehem, Pa., told
To expedite removal of a key radioactive threat close to the Columbia River, the U.S. Energy Dept. hopes to dismantle a long-dormant nuclear reactor at the Hanford nuclear-waste site in Washington state with robotic technology instead of “cocooning” the structure for long-term storage, as has been done with five similar structures at the site. The multistory, 50,000-sq-ft K-East Reactor, which houses 240,000 graphite blocks that make up the reactor core, is a special case because of soil contamination around and under the structure, says Tom Teynor, DOE project director for the reactor. The agency and its contractors are testing new
In today’s competitive construction economy, improving on-site management of project equipment, supplies and process is now critical. With help from Fluor Corp., Clemson University has developed the first online graduate degree program in capital project supply- chain management for construction professionals. The Clemson, S.C.-based program borrows heavily from proven industrial engineering approaches. Photo: Courtesy of Clemson University Supply-chain management in industrial settings and in construction “are quite similar,” says William Ferrell, Clemson’s industrial engineering department head. Photo: Courtesy of Fluor Better management of materials and equipment can save money. Related Links: Borderless Learning Mole Resurfaces As a Teaching Tool Separate
On Oct. 5, Autodesk reported 255,000 downloads of its AutoCAD WS Mobile app for the iOS operating system in the first five days of availability as a free app from Apple’s iTunes store. The app lets Apple iPhone, iTouch and iPad device users view, edit and share AutoCAD and DWG files through web browsers and mobile devices. More than 100,000 files were uploaded to sharing servers in the first days. “It’s an amazing response,” says Amar Hanspal, senior vice president of Autodesk platform solutions and emerging business. “We can’t add servers fast enough.” He says the application is engineered to
Infrastructure software experts say the Stuxnet worm that has disrupted many of Iran’s nuclear powerplants—and is designed to target industrial controls—escalates the data-systems protection battle. The malware is said to be the first “rootkit”-level virus coded to attack powerplants and industrial controls. “This provides a blueprint for how control systems can be exploited,” says Mark Weatherford, chief security officer for the North American Electric Reliability Corp. The NERC consortium has urged members to upgrade user policies and run system scans since researchers discovered the worm last summer. The malware is designed to target programmable logic controllers (PLCs), says Liam Omercu,
Autodesk is back for another bite of Apple. The San Raphael, Calif.-based design-software developer announced on Aug. 31 that, for the first time since 1995, the current version of AutoCAD will be available for Macintosh computers running the Apple operating system as well as for AutoCAD WS, a mobile app that lets users share AutoCAD designs in the field using Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iTouches. Illustration: Richard Demler Autodesk spokesman Noah Cole says the release gives anyone with an iOS device or a modern web browser the ability to view, edit and collaborate on an AutoCAD DWG file. “We imagine
In late July, researchers began crowd-sourced experiments with an Internet-based tool to translate photographs taken from many angles, of any object, into digital 3D models. Photo Courtesy Of Autodesk Cloud-processed model office building includes and references the vantage point of each photo contributing to the model The beauty in the idea of CAD software vendor Autodesk Labs’ Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly, is its simplicity. The Photo Scene Editor can accept and process dozens and dozens of uploaded photos and return a model in minutes. The tool harnesses cloud computing to stitch images into a 3D matrix, using algorithms
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