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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
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
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
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
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
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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 gives a quick overview of how we build underwater structures. Oceans, rivers, and lakes are often beautiful, but they’re not necessarily convenient places to build things. Yet, many types of the infrastructure we depend on every day, including wharves, bridges, and dams, are founded below the water. How do they do it? On this episode, we're talking about different types of underwater construction, including cofferdams, diversions, caissons, and drilled shafts. Whether the construction site is on the bottom of a lake or river, or simply located in the floodplain and only at risk during extreme weather, engineers and construction contractors put a significant amount of thought and consideration into the feasibility and costs of managing this water.
- Subjects:
- Hydraulic Engineering
- Keywords:
- Underwater construction Hydraulic engineering
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
The modern world depends on electricity. It’s a crucial resource, especially in urban areas, but electricity can’t be created, stored, and provided at a later time. The instant it’s produced, it’s used no matter how far apart the producer is from the user. And the infrastructure that makes all this possible is one of humanity’s most important and fascinating engineering achievements: the power grid.
- Subjects:
- Building Services Engineering and Electrical Engineering
- Keywords:
- Electric power distribution
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Traffic management in dense urban areas is an extremely complex problem with a host of conflicting goals and challenges. One of the most fundamental of those challenges happens at an intersection, where multiple streams of traffic - including vehicles, bikes and pedestrians - need to safely, and with any luck, efficiently, cross each others’ paths. However we accommodate it now or in future, traffic will continue to be one of the biggest challenges in our urban areas and traffic signals will continue to be one of its solutions.
- Subjects:
- Transportation
- Keywords:
- Traffic signs signals Roads -- Interchanges intersections Traffic flow
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
We normally build a dam to hold water back and store it for use in water supply, irrigation, hydropower, or flood control. But sometimes we have to let some water go. Whether we need it downstream or the impounded water behind the dam is simply too full to store any more, nearly every dam needs a spillway to safely discharge water. The spillway is a critical part of any dam and often the most complex component. So how does it work?
- Subjects:
- Hydraulic Engineering
- Keywords:
- Hydraulic structures Spillways Dams Reservoirs Diversion structures (Hydraulic engineering)
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
A weir is a small dam built across a river to control the upstream water level. Weirs have been used for ages to control the flow of water in streams, rivers, and other water bodies. Unlike large dams which create reservoirs, the goal of building a weir across a river isn’t to create storage, but only to gain some control over the water level. Over time, the term weir has taken on a more general definition in engineering to apply to any hydraulic control structure that allows water to flow over its top, often called its crest. In fact, the spillways of many large dams use weirs as control structures. So how do they work?
- Subjects:
- Hydraulic Engineering
- Keywords:
- Dams Hydraulics Weirs
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
This video discusses a few modern techniques that help improve design life of concrete, including roller compacted concrete (RCC) and water reducing admixtures (superplasticizers). There are a whole host of differences between modern concrete and that of the western Roman empire that I didn’t have time to go into, including freeze/thaw damage.
- Subjects:
- Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Concrete construction Roller compacted concrete Concrete -- Additives Concrete
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- Video
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Video
Dams serve a wide variety of purposes from hydropower to flood control to storage of water for municipal and industrials uses. But when a dam’s useful purpose fades away, the structure itself still remains. Dams come in all shapes and sizes, but contrary to what you might think, the most dangerous dams are often the smallest, also known as low head dams.
- Subjects:
- Hydraulic Engineering
- Keywords:
- Dam safety Dams Hydraulics
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Engineers need to be able to predict how water will behave in order to design structures that manage or control it. And fluids don’t always behave the way you’d expect. On this episode, we’re talking about one of the most interesting phenomena in open-channel flow: the hydraulic jump.
- Subjects:
- Hydraulic Engineering
- Keywords:
- Hydraulics Hydraulic jump
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
Wind can be one of the most critical and complicated loads on civil structures. The case of the Tacoma Narrows bridge is a well-known cautionary tale that’s discussed in engineering and physics classrooms across the world. Both resonance from vortex shedding and aeroelastic flutter contributed to the failure. When you push the envelope, you have to be vigilant because things that didn’t matter before start to become important (e.g. wind loads on lighter structures). Unanticipated challenges are a cost of innovation and that’s something that we can all keep in mind.
- Subjects:
- Structural Engineering
- Keywords:
- Washington (State) -- Tacoma -- Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940) Suspension bridges Wind-pressure
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
While steel reinforcement solves one of concrete’s greatest limitations, it creates an entirely new problem: Corrosion of embedded steel rebar is the most common form of concrete deterioration. There are lots of ways to combat this problem, a few of which we discuss/demonstrate in this video, including fiber reinforced concrete, adequate protective cover, and fiber reinforced polymer bars.
- Subjects:
- Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Protective coatings Reinforced concrete -- Corrosion -- Prevention Reinforcing bars -- Corrosion Fiber-reinforced concrete
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
This video shows more destructive testing to answer your questions about concrete. Concrete's greatest weakness is its tensile strength, which can be less than 10% of its compressive strength. So, we often reinforce it to create a composite material strong against all types of stress. This video briefly touches on conventional rebar and prestressed/post-tensioned reinforcement.
- Subjects:
- Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Reinforced concrete Concrete
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
What's the difference between concrete and cement? Concrete is the most important construction material on earth and foundation of our modern society. At first glance it seems rudimentary, but there is a tremendous amount of complexity involved in every part of designing and placing concrete. This video is meant to be a bare-bones introduction to the topic, with a cool demonstration of concrete strength using a hydraulic press.
- Subjects:
- Building and Real Estate
- Keywords:
- Concrete Cement
- Resource Type:
- Video
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Video
This video explains why ridges move, and other musings on thermal movement of large civil works. Most people have a certain intuition about thermal expansion, but you may not have considered how engineers design to accommodate it on large civil structures. The video gives a quick overview on this important consideration that engineers must account for when designing infrastructure like pipelines, bridges, and even sidewalks.
- Subjects:
- Structural Engineering
- Keywords:
- Structural analysis (Engineering) Expansion (Heat)
- Resource Type:
- Video