Future Buildings

Architects and civil engineers have a long history of working closely together to design new kinds of buildings that can help cities become more modern and adapt to the needs of the times.  This is also true in the present, and right now architects and civil engineers are working on new ways of designing buildings that can help cities modernize for the 21st century to become more sustainable and also to provide a higher quality of living for the people who live in cities around the world.

One of the biggest problems facing future cities is the fact that there will just be so many people in them.  By 2050 it's said that 2/3 of the world will live in cities, and China is a country that is dealing with this problem right now, where it has over 140 different cities with over 1 million people in them.  America only has 9 cities this large, and so Chinese engineers have started already to come up with ways to allow these people to live in cities with good conditions and not allow them to deteriorate into slums.  One solution that is made possible by many new technologies in engineering is building vertical cities, where instead of cities growing outward and taking up more and more space, the grow upward by building taller and taller buildings that eventually start to connect with each other and form different levels and communities.  An example of this on a small scale is these apartments in Singapore that all connect to create spaces for coffee shops, grocery stores, community areas, and social areas inside the complex.

Because these things are all built into the apartment complex less space is needed for these types of areas outside, so more of the city's land is available for other uses.  This means that cities can start to have more people living in good conditions without forcing them out into slums because more good apartments can be built in the same amount of space.  And these vertical cities can also take advantage of many other types of new city planning ideas to make them more sustainable too.

One popular idea that is starting to take off right now is where the tops and balconies of apartment and office buildings are turned into gardens that can help to grow some of the food that the people in these buildings will need to eat.  These gardens can be watered with recycled water that the building has already used to reduce their impact on the environment even more.  But the roof and balcony space of cities doesn't have to just be used for gardens either.  These future buildings will probably have solar panels on top to help them make more of their own power, and even possibly rain water collectors to help them reduce their impact on water systems too.

Driverless Cars

At first, driverless cars might not seems like the sort of new technology that would be interesting to civil engineers.  They're designed and built by the sorts of computers and robotics engineers that work for companies like Google, and it's a whole different kind of engineering than the kind that builds bridges and helps design cities.  But driverless cars have a lot of potential to help civil engineers plan future cities that are more sustainable, so keeping up with the development of this technology and the ways that it can change cities is still a good idea.

The short TED talk in this video shows a lot of great footage of what driverless cars can do.  The hard part about driving safely is that there are so many different things going on around the car at all times, and in many cases people get involved in accidents because they reacted  badly in a fast situation or weren't paying attention to everything.  But driverless cars don't make these kinds of mistakes, and since about 95% of traffic deaths are from accidents where human error is the cause, driverless cars give us a way to eliminate almost all traffic deaths by taking human error out of the equation.  The video shows how the cars use radar to sense everything going on around them at all times including other cars, pedestrians, animals, and anything else that could be blocking the road.  The computers in charge of the car can see things around them better than a human could, and can also process all this information faster than a human could to react instantly and avoid accidents in ways that would be impossible for people to do.  This means that driverless cars could safely drive at speeds up to double what humans can, and can pack together tighter on highways at high speed because of the fast reactions.  In major cities they wouldn't be able to go nearly as fast because of all of the intersections and pedestrians, but they could be hooked up to a network that would automatically direct cars through different routes to the same place to help avoid traffic jams and congestion on city roads, and this could seriously help reduce the carbon impact of traffic in the cities of the world.

One of the first real world tests of driverless cars in a city environment is going on in England soon, but the cars won't be the kind of personal cars that most people think of.  They'll be testing out driverless shuttles to get groups of people around areas of the city faster than they could by walking, and this shows one area where civil engineers can take advantage of driverless cars in city planning.  One of the big challenges in city planning is making a walkable city where the people living there need to drive for as few reasons as possible, and these driverless shuttles are one new way of public transportation that is easy to introduce into old and established cities to help make this a reality.  In the real future, if every car is driverless, then cities won't even need things like traffic lights or stop signs anymore because all of these parts of traffic engineering will be handled directly by the computer network in charge of the driverless cars in a much more efficient way than a human could plan out.

But driverless cars have a major flaw that could make it hard for them to completely replace regular cars, even though so far their safety record on the road is pretty much perfect.  This is the fact that they are controlled by computers, and so they can be hacked and manipulated by bad people who would want to cause damage and harm.  Engineers need to keep flaws like this in mind when they plan out cities, because if a city is 100% relying on driverless cars to move people around and this system gets hacked and goes down or out of control, then the whole city comes to a stop and is basically controlled by the hacker.  It's not the job of engineers really to worry about coming up with new security methods for the network, but it is the job of engineers to have a plan in place for the city in case the system goes down so business and life can keep going.

Smart Materials

Smart materials are one of the coolest new technologies out there right now, but they're hard to explain without actually seeing.  So if you go to about 4:00 into this video and watch for few seconds you'll see some smart materials in action and get a pretty good idea of how exciting they are for engineers.  The important part about the moving metal flaps in the demonstration is that those flaps are moving on their own and aren't being controlled by anything.  The way the heat from the sun effects the material they're made out of makes them curl up, so if they were placed on the outside of a skyscraper they would open on the sides of the building that were getting sunlight.  These new vents would let the building cool down easier from the heat that this sunlight would be adding, and means that skyscrapers with this kind of technology can stay cooler in hot summer months while using less electricity to power the massive air conditioning systems they need now.  Later in the video there's another part where she talks about making building walls open and close in the same way, so that the building could breathe itself naturally throughout the day and move air around to keep it cool without needing any power at all.

Another type of smart material that engineers can use in a lot of different places is conductive concrete.  This is just concrete with nanosized metal bits in the mix, but the metal content is set up in a way that lets the concrete conduct just a little bit of electricity.  This doesn't mean that the concrete will electrocute people who walk or drive on it, but the material can send small charges around to find faults in the concrete that would be caused by cracks or other weaknesses and defects long before they would be visible to human eyes or before they become a dangerous problem.  This would also mean that bridges, roads, and even building walls could be scanned for any areas that need to be repaired in a few seconds, which is a lot faster than the current way of walking very slowly around and looking very carefully at every inch of the surface to look for cracks and holes.  Another way that conductive concrete could be useful would be in designing safer roads for people to drive on in the rain or at night.  Usually in these times it can be hard to see the lines of the road, and sometimes the paint has faded off and is impossible to see.  But with electroluminescent materials a paint could used that lights up whenever a small current is run through it.  So by turning on the conductive concrete an entire highway or city could have roads with lanes that light up at night or in the rain to make it easier for drivers to see where they are going and help prevent accidents in these dangerous situations.

Nanotechnology

Probably one of the biggest advances in science that is happening around now is the development of nanotechnology in research labs.  When a lot of people think of nanotechnology they think of tiny robots that can build larger things by working together, but this is just a futuristic prediction of what nanotechnology might eventually turn into after a long time.  Right now though nanotechnology has already given engineers many more tools that they can use in their work, and it has many exciting new possible uses too.  

One very recent new technology for engineering that comes from nanotechnology is high efficiency solar panels.  These solar panels can capture 90% of the light they absorb and turn it into the heat that is needed to create power.  This is a much better use of this light than current solar panels can provide, and with a much higher efficiency solar panel engineers can generate more power with less area available to put the panels.  This means that buildings could be designed with solar panels like these on top and be able to generate enough power to possible run the entire building.  Also, the panels can be used very easily to help generate power for entire cities because they can replace the coal, oil, and gas that is used in current power plants.  These plants just need a source of heat to turn water into steam so they can use the steam to push the turbine and make electricity.  And these solar panels can be used to make this heat without fossil fuels, so cities can upgrade their power plants and get more sustainable power without having to replace their entire grids and systems.  

Another nanotechnology discovery that has helped engineering is ultrahigh performance concrete.  This is a mixture of concrete that uses carbon nanofibers to become stronger and lighter than any other type of concrete available.  So engineers are using it on places like bridges, where the weight of a concrete deck for cars to travel over is a big part of the weight that the supports have to carry.  If a new concrete is both stronger and lighter, then this lets engineers use less material and make the bridges cheaper to make.  It also lets them make bridges taller and longer than they ever could before, because this new material can completely open up new ways of designing and building bridges.

A final nanotechnology that has a lot of promise for the future is carbon nanotubes.  These are very small little cylinders of carbon atoms that are the strongest material ever discovered in history.  If engineers can figure out how to make a lot of them cheaply, they could be used for all sorts of impossible sounding things like building a space elevator.  But right now they can only be made in tiny amounts and are too expensive to be used realistically.

New Technologies in Engineering

Engineers have always been the people that have taken new discoveries in science and technology and found out ways to make them useful to people.  Back in ancient times engineers were the ones who figured out how to get water into cities, like how the Romans built the aquaducts to get fresh water across miles of land.  Engineers also needed to figure out how to make the discovery of electricity something that everyone could use, and designed and built the power plants and power grids that everyone relies on today.  So when scientists make breakthroughs, it's up to the engineers to find a way of putting this new knowledge to use in the real world.  This is especially true in modern times. Scientists are discovering new things faster than ever and the challenges that engineers need to solve are much more complicated than they have ever been in the past.

One of the biggest challenges that modern engineers face is from creating sustainable buildings, cities, and communities.  This is because current ways of building things results in a lot of carbon pollution in the atmosphere.  This has lead to climate change around the world, and engineers need to come up with new ways that have much less of an impact on the world's climate and use less resources than they do now.  A lot of this can be done by setting new rules and regulations, or even just passing laws that stop people from using power and water wastefully, but if engineers want to be able to do enough to make a serious difference with climate change then they are going to have to look at new technologies to help them do it.

For example, solar and wind power are new technologies that can create electricity sustainably and with no carbon pollution, but it is difficult to find ways to use them to power entire cities.  Some engineers in Australia though have found a way to power an entire office building completely with the solar and wind power it creates on its own, meaning that the building is already close to completely sustainable on its own.  On top of this, the building also recycles all of its own water using the power it generates itself, so it uses a very little amount of the water resources in the city where it is.

Both of these things are very important if the world wants to build sustainable communities.  Fossil fuels like oil and natural gas will start to run out later in this century, and unless engineers begin to design things that require less of this fuel now cities won't be able to keep their electricity for ever.  Also, the population of the world gets bigger and bigger every year, but the supply of fresh water for all of these people to share doesn't grow at all.  So unless engineers can find ways to use less water, there won't be enough water for everyone to drink in the future.

Not all of the new technologies that engineers are using are related to building sustainable cities or fighting against climate change.  Some of the most interesting ones just let engineers build things that have never been built before.  But new technologies are always being experimented with by engineers, and this blog is about all of them.