Why Digital Transformation is Surging in Construction

“Every CEO is talking about digital transformation right now,” a General Assembly executive recently said. In late 2018, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff said the spending cycle is stronger than he’s seen previously as well.

Photo by Conor Luddy on Unsplash

Google’s search traffic on the phrase “digital transformation” has risen exponentially over the last five years. It’s a climb that began in 2014, when the U.S. economy had its first true breakout year of recovery after the economic downturn of 2018.

This digital transformation surge is happening in the built environment as well, but it took a little longer to get there.

Solid Reasons for Resistance to Date

For the last 20 years, while other industries moved forward with digital transformation, construction lagged behind. Even as manufacturing improved its productivity rate to three times that of the construction industry, most AEC organizations clung to old ways.

This reluctance wasn’t purely Ludditism. The construction industry was one of the hardest hit in the recession that followed the 2008 global economic crisis. A lot of innovation related spending in that sector either slowed or ground to a halt.

Another key factor is that capital projects budgets are exceptionally large and contain a lot of inherent risks, so many stakeholders will try to mitigate that risk through the use of contracts and data hoarding. The problem with this, of course, is that these self-imposed bottlenecks slow everything down. They lower risk but also put a drag on productivity.

Why It’s Surging Now

These days, several megatrends are pushing digital transformation forward in construction. In the U.S., strong economic tailwinds are one factor. For the same reasons a big economic slowdown disproportionately impacts construction, a strong economic recovery tends to reward it.

Another is that in a downturn like the one of ten years ago, the economy is incentivized to innovate, partly in an attempt to do more with less. Over the last decade, constructech firms got $10 billion in investment funding and the arrival of Industry 4.0 brought on a wave of interest in how the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality, AI, and robotics could boost efficiency.

In short, this burst of new technology meant the potential productivity gains for construction became too large to ignore. Technology use cases span the entire project life cycle from pre-construction to maintenance. While a lot of the news coverage tends to focus on tangible, onsite applications like drones and 3D printed buildings, the truth is that for most organizations the lowest hanging fruit is in back office and collaboration related applications, namely revamping the way they handle data, design, resource planning, processes, and project management.

What’s great about the recent surge in digital transformation is that construction can now leverage the most successful efforts of other industries. The holistic approach to data that some car manufacturers began embracing ten plus years ago, for instance, promises to things profoundly more efficient in construction. We estimate that some of the companies embracing a holistic data environment will be able to do the same number of projects with just ten percent of their current overhead—freeing them up to focus on the creative, value-added side of their work.

Combine all this with construction’s labor crunch and some healthy fears about big tech players like Amazon sniffing around the construction industry and you have the makings of super cycle of digital transformation spending.

The future looks bright. Construction is one of the fastest growing industries in the world with a global market expected to grow to 12.7 trillion by 2022. If your organization has been dragging its feet on digital transformation efforts, there’s never been a better time to kick it into high gear.

Source and Credits: https://enstoa.com/blog/why-digital-transformation-surging-construction

How Driver less Cars makes decisions

Moving to another lane is a basic procedure: watch that it’s protected, at that point reflect, flag, move. At any rate that is the situation for human drivers, as we to a great extent depend on our faculties and muscle memory. To play out a similar undertaking, a driverless vehicle depends on programming, some level of artificial knowledge and a bunch of sensor frameworks, (for example, split view cameras) mentioning numerous objective facts of its environment. Be that as it may, what precisely do driverless automobiles need to think about when choosing where to go and how to arrive securely?

Sharing the same road.

Most independent vehicles use a mix of sensors, radar and light discovery and running (light detection and ranging aka., LIDAR) gadgets. These enables the vehicle to perceive different vehicles just as cyclists and people on foot(pedestrians).

Independent participation.

Substantial vehicles can hinder sensors and keep self-sufficient vehicles from realizing how to respond. Be that as it may, future driver less autos will almost certainly convey and share tactile data, giving additional ‘eyes’ for the vehicle.

Surpassing vehicles.

Vans regularly straddle both the street and asphalt when making conveyances. By indicating driver less vehicles numerous instances of such occasions, the AI can figure out how to perceive when a vehicle is incidentally left.

Signals reading.

Risk, pointer and traffic lights are all-inclusive guidelines for drivers. Independent vehicles can respond to them similarly as people on account of a pre-modified arrangement of standards.

Knowledge of road network.

City-road network data can help a driver less vehicle’s choices. For instance, the vehicle will be progressively certain about overwhelming a stationary vehicle on lanes that get bunches of conveyances.

How does a Traffic light detect..a car for light to change.

How does a traffic light detect that a car has pulled up and is waiting for the light to change?

There is something exotic about the traffic lights that “know” you are there — the instant you pull up, they change! How do they detect your presence?

Some lights don’t have any sort of detectors. For example, in a large city, the traffic lights may simply operate on timers — no matter what time of day it is, there is going to be a lot of traffic. In the suburbs and on country roads, however, detectors are common. They may detect when a car arrives at an intersection, when too many cars are stacked up at an intersection (to control the length of the light), or when cars have entered a turn lane (in order to activate the arrow light).

There are all sorts of technologies for detecting cars — everything from lasers to rubber hoses filled with air! By far the most common technique is the inductive loop. An inductive loop is simply a coil of wire embedded in the road’s surface. To install the loop, they lay the asphalt and then come back and cut a groove in the asphalt with a saw. The wire is placed in the groove and sealed with a rubbery compound. You can often see these big rectangular loops cut in the pavement because the compound is obvious.

Inductive loops work by detecting a change of inductance. To understand the process, let’s first look at what inductance is. The illustration on this page is helpful.

What you see here is a battery, a light bulb, a coil of wire around a piece of iron (yellow), and a switch. The coil of wire is an inductor. If you have read How Electromagnets Work, you will also recognize that the inductor is an electromagnet.

If you were to take the inductor out of this circuit, then what you have is a normal flashlight. You close the switch and the bulb lights up. With the inductor in the circuit as shown, the behavior is completely different. The light bulb is a resistor (the resistance creates heat to make the filament in the bulb glow). The wire in the coil has much lower resistance (it’s just wire), so what you would expect when you turn on the switch is for the bulb to glow very dimly. Most of the current should follow the low-resistance path through the loop. What happens instead is that when you close the switch, the bulb burns brightly and then gets dimmer. When you open the switch, the bulb burns very brightly and then quickly goes out.

The reason for this strange behavior is the inductor. When current first starts flowing in the coil, the coil wants to build up a magnetic field. While the field is building, the coil inhibits the flow of current. Once the field is built, then current can flow normally through the wire. When the switch gets opened, the magnetic field around the coil keeps current flowing in the coil until the field collapses. This current keeps the bulb lit for a period of time even though the switch is open.

The capacity of an inductor is controlled by two factors:

• The number of coils
• The material that the coils are wrapped around (the core)

Putting iron in the core of an inductor gives it much more inductance than air or any other non-magnetic core would. There are devices that can measure the inductance of a coil, and the standard unit of measure is the henry.

So… Let’s say you take a coil of wire perhaps 5 feet in diameter, containing five or six loops of wire. You cut some grooves in a road and place the coil in the grooves. You attach an inductance meter to the coil and see what the inductance of the coil is. Now you park a car over the coil and check the inductance again. The inductance will be much larger because of the large steel object positioned in the loop’s magnetic field. The car parked over the coil is acting like the core of the inductor, and its presence changes the inductance of the coil.

A traffic light sensor uses the loop in that same way. It constantly tests the inductance of the loop in the road, and when the inductance rises, it knows there is a car waiting!

Smart Cities ????

Stay tuned……Serious stuff about smart cities is on the way. Keep following and happy knowledge sharing.

Information Pill …..

PYRAMID Blocks : Laborers used 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu, which stands 146 meters high, has a 230-meter-square base and weighs about 6.5 million tons. interesting……

The technology behind the Pyramids

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alien, aliens, climate, engineers, history, middle-east, pyramids

The Ancient Pyramid technology

The ancient pyramids are among the most astonishing structures in the world. Built in ancient times by workers who didn’t have the benefit of modern tools and machinery, they are a constant source of fascination. Most of us think of ancient when pyramids come to mind, but they exist in many parts of the world. Why did the ancients build pyramids? What was their purpose? Is there any special meaning behind the pyramid shape? How were they built without earth-moving or heavy-lift machinery? In this article, we’ll examine pyramids around the world, how they were constructed and who used them.

What is a pyramid?

A pyramid is a geometrical solid with a square base and four equilateral triangular sides, the most structurally stable shape for projects involving large amounts of stone or masonry. Pyramids of various types, sizes and complexities were built in many parts of the ancient world (like Central America, Greece, China and Egypt). In the history of Egypt and China, they were primarily tombs and monuments to kings and leaders. The pyramids of the Mayans and Aztecs of Central America were mainly religious temples, though some of them housed burial chambers.

The Central American pyramids were smaller and sometimes wider than their Egyptian counterparts. These pyramids also took longer to finish — they were often built and modified over hundreds of years, while Egyptian pyramids took a couple of decades to construct. Pyramids in Central America were integrated into Aztec and Mayan cities, whereas Egyptian pyramids were located away from the major cities.

The ancestors of these great structures are the burial tombs found throughout North America and Europe — simple mounds of earth that covered burial chambers. The first tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs were flat, box-shaped buildings called mastabas (Arabic for “bench”). Pharaohs later built grander tombs by adding levels on top of the box to form stepped pyramids. Stepped pyramids are prevalent in Central America. In Mesopotamia, they were called ziggurats.

The Egyptians took pyramid design to new heights, culminating in the constru­ction of the pyramids of Giza in the 26th century B.C. Laborers used 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu, which stands 146 meters high, has a 230-meter-square base and weighs about 6.5 million tons. A number of pyramids, including the Great Pyramid of Khufu, have survived thousands of years of exposure to the elements, a tribute to the ancient architects, engineers and workers who built them.

Ancient Technology-Mathematics

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civilengineering, climate, mathematics, maths, prehistoric artifacts, science

Mathematics is essential in our modern society. From economic models used at Wall Street to Google’s search algorithms and so many things more, mathematics is all around us and stands at the forefront of our scientific knowledge. Ancient mathematics started far before civilization, even before language itself. Most even claim the construction of all the ancient structures across the world could not have been created without the use of some form of advanced mathematical technology.

The origins of mathematics probably lie in the abstract concepts of numbers and values. Modern studies of animal cognition have shown that these concepts are not unique to humans but can also be found in certain animals such as apes. Mathematical ideas would have been part of everyday life in ancient hunter-gatherer societies, from probable simple comparisons of objects to defining what time of year it was. The idea of the “number” evolving over time is supported by the appearance of certain languages that have preserved the distinction between “one”, “two”, and “many”, but not specifically numbers larger than two.

The oldest known supposed mathematical object is the Lebombo bone that was discovered in the Lebombo mountains of Swaziland, Africa and was dated back to approximately 35,000 BC. It consists of 29 distinct notches cut into a baboon’s fibula. Other prehistoric artifacts were discovered in Africa and France, dated between 35,000 and 20,000 years old, suggesting early attempts to quantify time.

The Ishango bone that was found near the Nile river (northeastern Congo), may be as much as 20,000 years old and consists of a series of tally marks carved in three columns running the length of the bone. Many scholars think the Ishango bone shows either the earliest known demonstration of sequences of prime numbers or a six month lunar calendar.

In the book “How Mathematics Happened: The First 50,000 Years”, by Peter Rudman, he argues that the development of the concept of prime numbers could only have been created after the concept of division, which he dates to after 10,000 BC, with prime numbers probably not being understood until about 500 BC. Peter Rudman also writes that “no attempt has been made to explain why a tally of something should exhibit multiples of two, prime numbers between 10 and 20, and some numbers that are almost multiples of 10.”

The Ishango bone, according to scholar Alexander Marshack, may have influenced the later development of mathematics in Egypt as, like some entries on the Ishango bone, Egyptian arithmetic also made use of multiplication by 2, however, this is disputed.

Predynastic Egyptians of the 5th millennium BC pictorially represented geometric designs. It has been claimed that megalithic monuments in England and Scotland, dating from the 3rd millennium BC, incorporate geometric ideas such as circles,ellipses, and Pythagorean triples in their design.

The currently oldest undisputed mathematical usage is in Mesopotamian sources. Thus it took humans at least 45,000 years from the attainment of behavioral modernity and language to develop mathematics as such.

Still much is unknown about the history of mathematics, especially how ancient structures were built with such a high level of precision and detail and without the supposed use of highly advanced mathematics we know today.

Mesopotamian clay tablets dating back to the 4th millennium BC claim their advanced knowledge was given to them by advanced beings they refer to as the Anunnaki (meaning something as “those who Anu sent from heaven to earth”). Maybe new findings of ancient objects can shed more light on how ancient man obtained its advanced knowledge of mathematics.

The Blueprint

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architecture, civil engineer, engineering, mechanics

If you have ever watched a house being built, or if you have ever had an addition put onto an existing house, you know that the standard method of communication is a big piece of paper called a blueprint. Blueprinting is the standard method used to copy large architectural and construction drawings. A blueprint used to consist of white lines on a blue background. A more recent process uses blue lines on a white background.

The term “blueprint” is usually used to describe two printing methods, the blueprint and the diazotype.

Blueprinting is the older method, invented in 1842. The drawing to be copied, drawn on translucent paper, is placed against paper sensitized with a mixture of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide. The sensitized paper is then exposed to light. Where the areas of the sensitized paper are not obscured by the drawing, the light makes the two chemicals react to form blue. The exposed paper is then washed in water. This produces a negative image, with the drawing appearing in white against a dark blue background.

In the diazotype method, the paper is light-sensitized with a mixture of a diazonium salt (used in the manufacture of dyes), a reactant, and an acid that keeps the diazonium salt and the reactant from reacting with each other. The semi-transparent original is placed on top of the sensitized paper, and a copy of the same size as the original is made by direct contact. Light destroys the diazonium salt. Ammonia gas or solution is used as a developer after exposure — it neutralizes the acid and allows the remaining diazonium salt to combine with the reactant to create a blue dye. The chemicals on the paper acquire color only in the areas not exposed to light. This diazotype method produces dark lines on a white background, and is the popular method used today for reproduction of large-format drawings.

The reason people still use blueprints is because it is an inexpensive process. Compared to the cost of creating a large-format copying machine, a diazotype machine is a great bargain.

Wind Resistance to Sky Scrappers

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citicorp center, force of gravity, steel skeleton, tuned mass damper

In addition to the vertical force of gravity, skyscrapers also have to deal with the horizontal force of wind. Most skyscrapers can easily move several feet in either direction, like a swaying tree, without damaging their structural integrity. The main problem with this horizontal movement is how it affects the people inside. If the building moves a substantial horizontal distance, the occupants will definitely feel it.

The most basic method for controlling horizontal sway is to simply tighten up the structure. At the point where the horizontal girders attach to the vertical column, the construction crew bolts and welds them on the top and bottom, as well as the side. This makes the entire steel super structure move more as one unit, like a pole, as opposed to a flexible skeleton.

For taller skyscrapers, tighter connections don’t really do the trick. To keep these buildings from swaying heavily, engineers have to construct especially strong cores through the center of the building. In the Burj Kalifa, the Chrysler Building and other skyscrapers from that era, the area around the central elevator shafts is fortified by a sturdy steel truss, braced with diagonal beams. Most recent buildings have one or more concrete cores built into the center of the building.

Making buildings more rigid also braces them against earthquake damage. Basically, the entire building moves with the horizontal vibrations of the earth, so the steel skeleton isn’t twisted and strained. While this helps protect the structure of the skyscraper, it can be pretty rough on the occupants, and it can also cause a lot of damage to lose furniture and equipment. Several companies are developing new technology that will counteract the horizontal movement to dampen the force of vibration. To learn more about these systems, check out How Smart Structures Will Work.

Some buildings already use advanced wind-compensating dampers. The Citicorp Center in New York, for example, uses a tuned mass damper. In this complex system, oil hydraulic systems push a 400-ton concrete weight back and forth on one of the top floors, shifting the weight of the entire building from side to side. A sophisticated computer system carefully monitors how the wind is shifting the building and moves the weight accordingly. Some similar systems shift the building’s weight based on the movement of giant pendulums.

Functional of Sky scraper

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In the last section, we saw that new iron and steel manufacturing processes opened up the possibility of towering buildings. But this is only half the picture. Before high-rise skyscrapers could become a reality, engineers had to make them practical.

Once you get more than five or six floors, stairs become a fairly inconvenient technology. Skyscrapers would never have worked without the coincident emergence of elevator technology. Ever since the first passenger elevator was installed in New York’s Haughwout Department Store in 1857, elevator shafts have been a major part of skyscraper design. In most skyscrapers, the elevator shafts make up the building’s central core.

Figuring out the elevator structure is a balancing act of sorts. As you add more floors to a building, you increase the building’s occupancy. When you have more people, you obviously need more elevators or the lobby will fill up with people waiting in line. But elevator shafts take up a lot of room, so you lose floor space for every elevator you add. To make more room for people, you have to add more floors. Deciding on the right number of floors and elevators is one of the most important parts of designing a building.

Building safety is also a major consideration in design. Skyscrapers wouldn’t have worked so well without the advent of new fire-resistant building materials in the 1800s. These days, skyscrapers are also outfitted with sophisticated sprinkler equipment that puts out most fires before they spread very far. This is extremely important when you have hundreds of people living and working thousands of feet above a safe exit.

Architects also pay careful attention to the comfort of the building’s occupants. The Empire State Building, for example, was designed so its occupants would always be within 30 feet (ft) of a window. The Comers bank building in Frankfurt, Germany has tranquil indoor garden areas built opposite the building’s office areas, in a climbing spiral structure. A building is only successful when the architects have focused not only on structural stability, but also usability and occupant satisfaction