Research Guide in Civil Engineering - Essay Example

The Institution of Civil Engineers’ website https://www.ice.org.uk provides student career advice, conference lists, and useful source references for civil engineering aspects. Another relevant website is https://www.icivilengineer.com, which provides numerous links to hand-picked websites containing information on civil and structural engineering and technology. A third website is https://www.cif.org, which is managed by the Construction Innovation Forum that seeks to recognize construction industry innovations that improve the cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of structures and constructions. Finally, the American Society of Civil Engineers runs the https://www.asce.org website which has a membership of almost 150,000 in more than 140 countries. This website provides access to journals, magazines, papers, and books related to civil and structural engineering.

Lignos et al (2012) set out to investigate the critical parameters that influence steel frame structure numerical modeling for reliable simulations of structure collapse. The authors base their collapse evaluations on experimental data from a four-story steel moment frame full-scale shaking table collapse test, as well as a parallel blind numerical analysis contest. They find that the prediction of a sideways collapse mechanism for regular plan view buildings using 3D and 2D analyses has no clear advantage. They specifically note that a combination of local buckling delays in first-story columns and increased bending strength is effective in enhancing seismic performance against structural collapse (Lignos et al, 2012). This resource is particularly useful when considering the construction of structures in areas prone to seismic disturbances.

The next article follows up on the tsunami that ravaged the northeastern coast of Japan and the efforts being made to fend off similar disasters in the future. In this case, the focus is on building a chain of cement walls approximately 400 km long and almost five stories high in some places (Kurtenbach, 2015). This structural project is meant to improve on an earlier sea wall built previously at Iwanuma beach, which managed to slow the tsunami, although the wall of water was still able to sweep almost three miles inland. This wall is to be built along with a mixture of planted mixed forests on tall mounds of rubble and soil, creating a ‘green’ wall (Kurtenbach, 2015). This information is relevant in case a specific region is vulnerable to tsunamis, while the resource may be used in understanding the trade-offs between the need for structural barriers and environmental conservation.

The major headline in the NYT on May 1, 1990, was ‘Legal Ripples of Spill is said to Distort Big Picture of Damage’. This headline story focused on the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, especially in Prince William Sound, as well as the actions of marine scientists in understanding how the spill was impacting the environment and ecosystem. This information was retrieved by logging into the PSU database and searching for the NYT database by title. Under Title N was the New York Times Historical database available from 1851 and after clicking on it, the next step involved entering the date, month, and year of my birth.