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Video
Almost everyone agrees that flooding is bad. Most years it’s the number one natural disaster in the US by dollars of damage. So being able to characterize flood risks is a crucial job of civil engineers. Engineering hydrology has equal parts statistics and understanding how society treats risks. Water is incredibly important to us, and it shapes almost every facet of our lives, but it’s almost never in the right place at the right time. Sometimes there’s not enough, like in a drought or just an arid region, but we also need to be prepared for the times when there’s too much water, a flood. Rainfall and streamflow have tremendous variability and it’s the engineer’s job to characterize that so that we can make rational and intelligent decisions about how we develop the world around us.
- Subjects:
- Hydraulic Engineering and Disaster Control and Management
- Keywords:
- Floods Hydrology Flood control -- Management
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Dirt is probably the cheapest and simplest construction material out there, but it's not very strong compared to other choices. Luckily geotechnical engineers have developed a way to strengthen earthen materials with almost no additional effort - Mechanically Stabilized Earth (aka MSE or Reinforced Soil).
- Subjects:
- Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Reinforced soils
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
This video explores a primer on one of the most important companions to civil engineering: land surveyors. Conventional measurement tools like a tape measure and protractor don't work for large civil structures and public works projects. Surveying is essentially the science of measuring big stuff. In this video I give a quick explanation of how surveying works and show a few ways you can do your own leveling survey at home. No sines, cosines, or tangents required!
- Subjects:
- Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics
- Keywords:
- Surveying
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
In civil engineering, quicksand is more than just a puddle of mud! The "quick condition" occurs when seepage reduces the effective stress of a soil. This can lead to some dangerous conditions, especially if the seepage causes piping erosion to occur at a dam.
- Subjects:
- Hydraulic Engineering
- Keywords:
- Seepage Dam failures Quicks Fluid mechanics
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
In general, and compared to other common building materials, metals have excellent mechanical properties. They are hard, tough, strong, and durable. As someone who occasionally works the wood, even I can admit that metals are a superior material in many regards. So you can see why it would be advantageous to have a way to connect them together, especially if you can do it in such a way that joint isn’t the weakest part of your assembly. That’s the goal of welding, and luckily, this is not something reserved for industrial factories and machine shops. From my own experiences so far, welding is something you might be able to do yourself as a hobby. And stay tuned till the end for some tips for getting started.
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Video
This is a demo of a bell siphon I built in collaboration with a couple of engineering professors. There are certain cases where it would be nice to be able to create a siphon without any intervention, a self-priming or automatic siphon: the next level of siphonry. It's built out of an acrylic sheet and a piece of clear pipe.
- Subjects:
- Building Services Engineering
- Keywords:
- Siphons
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
The vast majority of our grid-scale storage of electricity uses this clever method. Electricity faces a fundamental problem that comes with pretty much any product that’s provided on-demand: our ability to generate large amounts of it doesn’t match up that closely with when we need it. The storage of electricity for later use, especially on a large scale, is quite challenging. That’s not to say that we don’t store energy at grid scale though, and there’s one type of storage that makes up the vast majority of our current capacity.
- Subjects:
- Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering
- Keywords:
- Energy storage Water-power Pumped storage power plants
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Discussing some of the fascinating engineering that goes into overhead electric power transmission lines. In the past, power generating plants were only able to serve their local areas. As power plants grew larger and further away from populated areas, the need for ways to efficiently move electricity over long distances has become more and more important. Stringing power lines across the landscape to connect cities to power plants may seem as simple as connecting an extension cord to an outlet, but the engineering behind these electric superhighways is more complicated and fascinating than you might think.
- Subjects:
- Building Services Engineering and Electrical Engineering
- Keywords:
- Electric power transmission Electric lines
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Untangling the various equipment you might see in an electrical substation. In many ways, the grid is a one-size-fits-all system - a gigantic machine to which we all connect spinning in perfect synchrony across, in some cases, an entire continent. On the other hand, our electricity needs, including when we need it, how much we need, and how reliably it should be delivered vary widely. Substations play a critical role in controlling and protecting the power grid.
- Subjects:
- Building Services Engineering and Electrical Engineering
- Keywords:
- Electric power distribution Electric substations
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
This video continues the series on the power grid by diving deeper into the engineering of large-scale electricity generation. The importance of electricity in our modern world can hardly be overstated. What was a luxury a hundred years ago is now a critical component to the safety, prosperity, and well-being of nearly everyone. Generation is the first step electricity takes on its journey through the power grid, the gigantic machine that delivers energy to millions of people day in and day out. So how does it work?
- Subjects:
- Building Services Engineering and Electrical Engineering
- Keywords:
- Electric power production
- Resource Type:
- Video