The new Cat s61 Industrial Ready Smartphone was not designed for people looking to watch kitten videos and take selfies in the safety of their own home or cubicle writes Jeffrey Heimgartner for engineering.com.

A Chinese development company planning to fly in 200 overseas tradies for an Auckland hotel build are prepared to pay only three-quarters of the normal hourly rate - with further deductions to workers' pay for travel and accommodation.

Feb 27, 2018  - Disruptive technologies are redefining the construction industry, specialist tutors at Ara Institute of Canterbury say, and both industry and education institutes must catch up fast.

Feb 21, 2018 - Look around you. Well, actually, look up. If you’re inside a modern building, there’s every likelihood that you’re surrounded by heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment. You might even be in an au courant structure where the HVAC ducting is exposed, lending the space a chic, industrial feel.

Whatever the case may be, it’s undeniable that HVAC technology has given rise to the architecture that we work and live in today. But how does all of this ducting and air management come about? Well, architects and drafters have to build these systems into their plans.

To help this cadre of comfort providers in their efforts, JTB World introduced an app, HVACPAC, that will run inside AutoCAD 2018. The HVACPAC app was developed using South African HVAC standards, meaning that its standards are similar to most other countries’ standards. It comes complete with both 2D and 3D tools for developing overhead schematic maps, as well as side-on views for HVAC control rooms and other facilities for maintaining and servicing HVAC hardware.

This seems like a pretty cool app, if HVAC is your game. It’s likely to take a lot of hassle out of building your own blocks or programming your own CAD protocols for building these standardized yet immensely complicated and critical pieces of architectural infrastructure.

According to JTB World, the new app includes all “in-line duct fittings and equipment, air terminals and HVAC associated pipe work.”

| A engineering.com release   |  February 21, 2018   |||

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Feb 15, 2018  - The Government’s decision to rule-out funding for embattled company Fletcher Building is a refreshing change from years of corporate welfare and a bad habit of taxpayers’ money being used to bailout private businesses, says the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union. Taxpayers’ Union Executive Director, Jordan Williams, says “The previous Government used our money to bail out Solid Energy, Rio Tinto, and even Mediaworks. It’s great news for taxpayers that the new Government is starting their term by refusing to continue that policy.” “Company bailouts are socialism for the rich. Shareholders don’t have to face any risk for their investment and the average taxpayer ends up footing the bill.” “Sometimes taxpayer groups are accused of always being negative. Here we want to applaud David Parker and his Government for making the principled, moral, and right decision.” | A taxpayers Union release  ||  February 15, 2018   |||

Feb 14, 2018  -  The construction union, E tū says it is working to clarify the effect of Fletcher Building and Interiors’ huge loss on its members at Fletchers.

“We’re still coming to terms with the fact that the country’s biggest building company is no longer bidding for new commercial projects, which is just extraordinary,” says Ron Angel, E tū’s Industry Coordinator for Engineering and Infrastructure.

“We’re trying to find out what happens next, but we will have members affected by this – though it’s currently unclear how many,” he says.

Ron says union organisers had visited Fletcher sites in Christchurch this morning, where members had been told to expect closure once work is finished on company projects including the city’s Justice and Emergency Services Precinct.

“Our immediate focus is to protect our members’ interests. We hope if there are redundancies our members can be redeployed in other Fletcher divisions. Some will be entitled to redundancy pay, but others won’t,” says Ron.

Ron says E tū has also spoken with members about the factors behind the near-billion dollar losses.

“In part, this is a result of too many people in head office doing the paperwork and pushing up overheads, and too few people on the ground doing the work,” says Ron.

He says a lack of experience in project management also meant a lot of mistakes, especially on the Justice precinct project.

“Our members have told us that 50 percent of that project was built twice.

“The workers say they’d put stuff up and a week later they’d be pulling it down again because the design changed or there were design faults, cracked tiles and the like. And there was too little supervision, with no one taking responsibility for the quality of the work.”

Poor cost control had also been flagged by the division’s Chair, Sir Ralph Norris, who has resigned.

Ron says Fletchers’ losses are “a salutary indictment of the sub-contracting model which is killing the construction industry in New Zealand.

“It means Fletchers has been unable to control costs and quality on these big projects and the result is just gobsmacking.”

| An E tū release  ||  February 14, 2018   |||

Feb 08, 2018  -  Auckland Airport today announced that it will build a new 65,000m2 distribution centre and a support centre for Foodstuffs North Island Ltd. The facility will be developed within Stage 4 of The Landing Business Park and will be constructed over a three year period, with completion scheduled to occur in late-2020. The development will comprise a world-class distribution centre plus a 5-star green-rated support centre, situated in landscaped and park-like surroundings.

A rather enlightening article posted on engineering.com by Roopinder Tara that has attracted a lot of interest. While the U.S. dawdles with much needed domestic infrastructure upgrades, China is already engaged in a project so massive that it will tilt the Earth in its favor. The trillion-dollar Belt Road Initiative (BRI) is a plan for a web of transportation routes (road, rail, shipping lanes, more—all leading to China) that will be created or expanded over the next 30-plus years. The BRI’s main purpose is to facilitate trade. China, the world’s leading producer of exports, no longer wants to rely on slow moving boats to move its goods out.

Jan 25, 2018  -  The Democratic Unionist Party has backed a crossing between Northern Ireland and Scotland, proposed in response to Boris Johnson's suggestion to build a bridge between Britain and France.

A bridge across the Irish Sea was proposed by Scottish architect Alan Dunlop as a direct response to the "Boris Bridge" suggested by the UK's foreign secretary, which would see a 22-mile-long crossing built between Britain and France after Brexit.

Jan 20, 2018  -  The concrete contains a fungus that produces calcium carbonate when exposed to water and oxygen.  If cracks in concrete can be fixed when they're still tiny, then they can't become large cracks that ultimately cause structures such as bridges to collapse. It is with this in mind that various experimental types of self-healing concrete have been developed in recent years. One of the latest utilizes a type of fungus to do the healing.

Inspired by the human body's ability to heal itself, the concrete was created by Congrui Jin, Guangwen Zhou and David Davies from New York's Binghamton University, along with Ning Zhang from Rutgers University. It incorporates spores of the fungus Trichoderma reesei, along with nutrients, that are placed within the concrete matrix as it's being mixed.

Once the concrete has hardened, the spores remain dormant until the first micro-cracks appear. When they do, water and oxygen find their way in. This causes the spores to germinate, grow, and precipitate calcium carbonate, which in turn seals the cracks.

"When the cracks are completely filled and ultimately no more water or oxygen can enter inside, the fungi will again form spores," says assistant professor Jin. "As the environmental conditions become favorable in later stages, the spores could be wakened again."

The research is still in the early stages, however, so don't go looking for the fungi concrete in a structure near you anytime soon. In the meantime, however, scientists from both Newcastle University and the University of Bath have been developing self-healing concrete that incorporates calcium carbonate-producing bacteria.

A paper on the Binghamton research was recently published in the journal Construction and Building Materials.

Source: Binghamton University  and New Atlas    ||  January 20, 2019   |||