 | Defective piles get it in the neck |
| Necking of cast-in-place concrete piles caused by collapse of surrounding soil could lead to catastrophic failure under load. The most widely used integrity-test is to hit the pile-head with a hammer and monitor axial vibration. This is generally successful at detecting defects but cannot confirm their size and nature, and is not suitable for piles with a length-diameter ratio greater than 30 or for those formed in very stiff soil. Dr David Lilley at Newcastle University has successfully trialled a new ‘receptance’ technique, which involves obtaining three axial resonant frequencies using a vibrator mounted at the pile head, and then analysing these to identify the nature, size and position of the defect. |
| (Geotechnical Engineering, Vol. 143 No. 4) |
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 | Waste management – a job for all |
| Civil engineers are more than up to the challenge of dealing with both the environmental and financial aspects of waste management but cannot do it in isolation, according to Alan Strong of Ulster University. In his introduction to 10 papers on waste management by leading experts, he says there is an urgent need to understand, regularise and monitor waste management within the various national and international contexts of sustainable development. The papers cover landfill techniques and economics, composting, energy from waste, recycling construction materials, upgrading wastewater systems and public-private waste management partnerships. |
| (Municipal Engineer, Vol. 139 No. 3) |
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 | Building the world's biggest Olympic stadium |
| The 115,000-seat Stadium Australia is the world's largest ever Olympic stadium. According to Steve Morley of consulting engineer Sinclair Knight Merz, the brief was to ensure that every spectator was within 190 m of the action, had a sightline at least 60 mm above the person in front and was not perched in anything steeper than 34°. The two halves of the innovative 30,000 m2 hyperbolic paraboloid roof are supported on two massive 300 m span steel prismatic arches. Other ground-breaking stadia projects reported on in this dedicated issue include the Amsterdam Arena in the Netherlands, Croke Park redevelopment in Ireland and the Wimbledon No. 1 Court, Reebok and Manchester United stadia in the UK. |
| (Structures and Buildings, Vol. 140, No. 4) |
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 | Balkan railways – passed the point of no return? |
| Rebuilding the smashed railway network in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the Balkan War is likely to take so long that a whole generation will grow up with no experience of rail travel. As such there is a real risk the network will never recover. Major Richard Brown, part of the British Army's new civil affairs group based in the former Yugoslavia, reports on the difficult and hazardous task of trying to recreate the country's railway network following the devastation of the 1991-1995 Balkan War. Numerous bridges were destroyed along with virtually all signalling and overhead electric lines, rolling stock and maintenance facilities. The paper concludes that rail transport could simply cease to be viable in the region within the next 25 years. |
| (Transport, Vol. 141 No. 4) |
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 | Cliff protection – is it worth it? |
| Erosion of soft coastal cliffs around the world is a significant risk to coastal development but stopping the process can be very expensive. To help civil engineers decide which cliff protection schemes are worthwhile, a new risk-based approach for evaluating the economic benefits of such schemes has been developed with UK government funding. Jim Hall of Bristol University, Mark Lee of Newcastle University and Ian Meadowcroft of the Environment Agency say the approach is preferable to current practice, which is essentially deterministic and can underestimate economic risk. A risk-based approach reflects the uncertainty inherent in recession predictions. |
| (Water and Maritime Engineering, Vol. 142 No. 3) |