The civil engineering business has grown steadily due to advancements in technology. There is also a high number of civil engineers in today’s world. What are the different types of civil engineering? Did you know that there are different civil engineering specialties?
Civil engineers can specialize in other fields depending on passion or the desire to follow a particular career path. There are various engineering types such as structural engineering, construction, transportation, geotechnical engineering, water resources engineering, and environmental engineering.
The function of civil engineering in society is designing, building, and maintaining the foundation of our current society, bridges and roads, seaports and airports, the infrastructure for a better environment, and
drinking water and energy systems.
The main aim of civil engineers is to create, improve and protect the surrounding where you live. The main components of civil engineering are architecture, water, transport, geotechnical, structural, and management.
To excel as a civil engineer, there are several desirable traits one needs to possess. Does the person have good decision-making skills? Civil engineers need to look at different issues and know how to go about the solution. The civil engineering business requires math skills and good organizational skills as well.
Some of the most amazing things on the planet have been designed and constructed by the biggest civil engineering companies in the world. Using water infrastructure for dams, they have brought drinking water and water for agriculture to millions of people. Other civil engineer services have created some of the largest and most impressive buildings while transportation planning firms have created bridges that seem to defy gravity while being beautiful at the same time. Now Interesting Engineering has compiled a list of some of the more amazing accomplishments made by civil engineers in recent years. Here are five of them:
- The Three Gorges Dam: This was constructed in 2003 and is the biggest hydroelectric power plant in the world. This is one of the more dramatic uses of water infrastructure for dams. It is about 607 feet tall. It is named for the fact that it sits at an area where three rivers can be flooded. These are the Wu Xia, Xiling, and Qutang rivers. Nearly 4.7 billion kWhs are produced every year by the hydroelectric plant that is housed in the dam. If you took all the concrete that was used to construct this dam, you could fill about 10,200 swimming pools that are Olympic sized.
- The Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge: This was constructed in 2010. This bridge span is 102.4 miles long. That makes it the longest bridge on earth. The construction process took four years to finish. This bridge is a little different from other bridges constructed over the last few centuries. This is not a suspension bridge, it uses the viaduct design. It crosses a plethora of valleys and connects Nanjing (Jiangsu province) with Shanghai.
- The Palm Islands: These were designed and constructed in 2014. The reason this was needed was the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirate wanted to commercialize the city of Dubai, which has rich oil reserves. Images of these islands have been shared all over the world and most people have seen what they look like. It took three billion cubic feet of sand to create these islands. This sand was taken from the ocean floor by barges. A civil engineering company built these island from the sea floor up. It also took a concrete support system to keep the islands and the hotel they house stable.
- The Venice Tide Barrier Project: This was designed and constructed in 2015. Venice is largely considered to be one of the most romantic and pretty places to visit in the world. The city has faced some serious civil engineering issues over the past few centuries and flooding has become more and more of a problem. This has been primarily due to the rising level of the sea that surrounds the city. While civil engineers did not use a water infrastructure for dams system but they did put in barriers that have been placed in rows to keep the city safe from flooding. These are mobile gates that can work to seal the city off if that is needed. This is not the largest project in civil engineering history but is doing a lot to protect one of the world’s greatest cities.
- The Kansai Airport. This was built a little further back, in 1994. At the time, the Osaka International Airport needed to be expanded. Civil engineers faced problems with that because of constraints imposed by the size of the growing city. There simply was no room to make the airport larger. To deal with this problem, Chinese civil engineers were brought in and they built themselves a new island to house the Kansai Airport. They used methods that were very similar to what would later be used to build the Palm Islands. The result was one of the longest airports in the world. The material they used was dirt that was taken from mountains in the area. Another amazing feat is that they made the airport to model the shape after that of a plane wing. That is credited with the reason planes are able to handle the strong winds associated with typhoons.
From creating water infrastructure for dams to building bridges with spans over 100 miles, civil engineers make magical creations look easy. These are amazing feats of design.