BELGIUM’S SART CANAL BRIDGE

The post you are about to read was taken from an article by Mr. marco marotta, posted in manomtr.com.

I certainly enjoy highlighting notable works of engineering and feel engineering efforts contribute greatly to our society in general.  It’s amazing to me the great number of engineering designs associated with the medical field but right now, we are going to look at a marvelous example of civil engineering.  The Sart Canal Bridge in Belgium is the subject.  We all know how you get from here to there overland—roads and railroads.  If you travel the United States Interstate system you have overpasses, underpasses, bridges, and other varieties of twists and turns.  I have family in Atlanta, Dallas and Austin, Texas and I can assure you their Interstate system is a marvel with more than occasional nightmares.   With that being said, how would you travel overland if you are concerned with shipping or boating in general? How would you do that when no waterways were available?  Digging a canal would be tremendously expensive, time consuming and in the United Sates, obtaining the proper approvals would take years if not decades.  Well, the country of Belgium had a very workable and incredible novel solution to that dilemma. 

Crossing an almost five hundred (500) meter valley at a height of between twelve (12) and twenty (20) meters with a waterway of thirty-three (33) meters working width and four point one five depth (4.15) meters depth. This requires an imposing, if not overwhelming piece of engineering. To integrate this work into its environment, the BEG architectural consultancy opted for a simple, repetitive and visually restful structure, rather than an artificially complicated project seeking to be forgotten by plays of shapes and colors.   You can see from the graphic below that the BEG Architectural Consultancy is primarily in Western Europe.

The consultancy insisted, however, on top quality execution with no open construction joints visible on the exposed faces. To avoid a crushing impression, it spaced the columns thirty-six (36) meters apart, an unusually wide span for this type of work that needs to support more than four (4) tons per square meter. Four tons is eight thousand (8,000) pounds per square meter.  The result is a project consisting of two inclined side walls comprising variable curvatures with a total height of seven point one (7.1) meters. At four hundred and ninety-eight (498) meters long, these are cast in a single piece to reduce the number of expansion and sealing joints. This was critical for esthetics and overall appearance. On these longitudinal carrying elements are then set, every four-point five meters (4.5 m), a twenty-seven (27) meter long fish-belly cross-members, which support the canal floor slab. In this way the waterway has a total width of forty-six (46) meters at its base and a height of seven-point (7.1) meters, resting on two rows of fourteen (14) columns each – one row per side wall – set thirty-six (36) meters apart longitudinally and thirty-three point four (33.4) meters cross-wise. The columns key figures are as follows:

Superstructure:

• 
  Concrete: 25,800 m³ reinforced steel: 3,350 t pre-stressed: 875 t Infrastructure
  concrete: 9,100 m³ reinforced steel: 850 t
• Foundations reinforced steel: 250 t Earthworks clearing: 370,000 m³ filling: 320,000 m³
• The Sart canal bridge is the world’s heaviest incrementally launched bridge, with the moving mass reaching sixty-five (65) tons at the end of the sliding process. At the same time, the huge longitudinal inertia of the deck combined with severe aesthetic constraints led the engineering team to devise technical solutions that are not standard for launched bridges.
• Construction began on October 1998 with completion February 2000

Digital pictures of the canal bridge are given below.  I consider this to be a marvelous example of civil engineering and one that took careful planning and execution.   Hope you enjoy this one.

GETTING OUT OF AFGHANISTAN

If you read my posts, you know I try very hard to stay from politics.  I find it somewhat self-defeating with patronships being what they are and most news media taking sides one way or another.  With that being said, I ran across two graphics that were definitely surprising to me.  I’m not going to debate whether or not leaving Afghanistan is or was a good idea nor will I comment on how we left the country nor what is in store for the years coming.  That’s for others to do—not me.  Just the facts “mam”. 

The number and name of the countries hosting refugees from the country was quite a surprise.  Not surprising, was the number of Afghan citizens crossing over the border into Pakistan and Iran.  Both countries border the country.  In looking at the numbers, I would suspect the Afghan people could see the Taliban retaking the country and placing themselves in control.  In other words, they got out while the getting was good.  Take a look.

What really blew me away, was the amount of money spent during our twenty (20) year involvement. As you can see, two trillion (2 Tn) was borrowed over the years and with interest, six point-five trillion (6.5 Tn), most put on the Federal credit card, will be owed to our creditors. 

As far as the number killed, a total of 172,142 individuals.  This is a human tragedy.  2,448 of our solders, and 47,000 Afghan civilians and 66,000 Afghan soldiers and police.  Tough numbers.

I’m sure, just like Vietnam, we will be spending decades dissecting the good, the bad and the ugly.   The mistakes made, the good things we did, and what might be in store for the country as a whole.  It’s very obvious to me we learned very little from Vietnam.  The English and the Russians found out they could not fight an endless war with tribal Afghans.

  The Russians were in from 24 December 1979 – 15 February 1989 (9 years, 1 month, 3 weeks and 1 day).   Britain’s latest war in Afghanistan began in the wake of the ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks on the United States. It continued for thirteen (13) years with the last combat troops leaving the country on 26 October 2014.  In looking at the Anglo-Afghan Wars, also called Afghan Wars, there were three conflicts (1839–42; 1878–80; 1919) in which Great Britain, from its base in India, sought to extend its control over neighboring Afghanistan and to oppose Russian influence there.

Hope you enjoy this one.  Many thanks for reading and, as always, I welcome your comments.

LOST YEAR

When I say lost year, I mean lost in terms of education.  Most parents and teachers would agree that the first years of a child’s education: i.e., pre-K through fifth (5) grade, are extremely important relative to teaching and learning the “basics”.  From sixth (6^th) grade to possibly tenth (10^th) grade, a student is learning how to learn.  Eleventh (11^th) and twelfth (12^th) grade a student, if taught properly, should be able to learn non-STEM subject matter on their own.   STEM subjects are difficult and generally require at some point in the learning process a teacher, either in or out of the classroom.  This is certainly true for mathematics. 

I know this sounds nuts but seventy-seven million (77,000,000) Americans do not have adequate Internet connection at home.  Only two-thirds of the people who live in the country’s bottom income bracket can access the Internet from home and one-half of those do so from a mobile cell phone.  This is according to the publication Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy organization that focuses on policymaking for a “free and open” Internet.  While one-quarter of white people lack wired “broadband”, the problem disproportionately affects the Black, Latino, and Indigenous people, one-third or more do not have access.  With that being the case, can you imagine the difficulty with some student working from home when an Internet connection is needed?  This is just what happened in 2020, our “COVID” year.  So many kids got behind; therefore, in my opinion, many students lost an entire year of learning.

We may say that is the case for students in every country to some degree.  2020 was tough year with two hundred nineteen million (219,000,000) cases and four million five hundred and fifty-five (4,550,000) deaths worldwide. 

Let’s take a look at how students in the United States compare with the rest of the world as far as progress.  It’s not really a nice picture in some instances.  One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).  Every three years the PISA measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among fifteen (15)-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive thirty-eighth (38th) out of seventy-one (71) countries in math and twenty-forth (24^th) in science. Among the thirty-five (35) members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked thirtieth (30^th) in math and nineteenth (19^th) in science.

Another long-running testing effort is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a project of the federal Education Department. In the most recent NAEP results, from 2015, average math scores for fourth- and eighth-graders fell for the first time since 1990. A team from Rutgers University is analyzing the NAEP data to try to identify the reasons for the drop in math scores.

The average fourth-grade NAEP math score in 2015 was two hundred and forty (240) on a scale of zero (00 to five hundred (500), the same level as in 2009 and down from two hundred and forty-two (242) in 2013. The average eighth-grade score was two hundred and eighty-two (282) in 2015, compared with two hundred and eighty-five (285) in 2013; that score was the lowest since 2007. (The NAEP has only tested 12th-graders in math four times since 2005; their 2015 average score of one hundred and fifty-two (152) on a zero to three hundred (0-to-300) scale was one point lower than in 2013 and 2009.) 

Looked at another way, the 2015 NAEP rated forty percent (40%) of fourth-graders, thirty-three percent (33%) of eighth-graders and twenty-five percent (25%) of 12th-graders as “proficient” or “advanced” in math. While far fewer fourth- and eighth-graders now rate at “below basic,” the lowest performance level (18% and 29%, respectively, versus 50% and 48% in 1990), improvement in the top levels appears to have stalled out. (Among 12th-graders, 38% scored at the lowest performance level in math, a point lower than in 2005.)  In my opinion, this is a terrible scorecard.  We MUST do better!

If we look at country ratings, we see the following:

As you can see, this is from the PEW Research Center.  To me, this is very discouraging.  Education has become a political football and not an issue, seemingly, worth correcting.  I read a very informative article some days ago that stated our sad lack of preparedness on the part of graduating seniors has become a national security issue.  Please note, the figures above are not for the college and university students.  The United States has long been the top receiving country for international students, who historically have been drawn by the high quality of U.S. higher education, its value on the international labor market, and access to job opportunities in the United States after graduation. About one-point one (1.1) million international students were enrolled in U.S. institutions in school year (SY) 2019-20. This marked a decrease of almost twenty thousand (20,000) international students from the year before, following a decade of consistent growth. Among the key factors for this decline were the rising cost of U.S. higher education, high numbers of student visa delays and denials, a difficult political environment for immigrants under the Trump administration, and expanded opportunities to study in other countries.   The COVID-19 pandemic has further aggravated these dynamics. Closures and limited access to U.S. embassies and consulates, travel restrictions, and personal safety considerations have complicated visa issuance and travel plans of international students. The Trump administration initially attempted to bar students from entering or remaining in the United States if their schools offered only online courses, although the order was quickly rescinded. Still, the move contributed to confusion and frustration for U.S. colleges and universities and their international students. At the start of the fall 2020 academic semester, the total number of international students enrolled in U.S. schools, including those physically present in the United States and studying online from abroad, decreased by 16 percent from the previous year. One in five of these students was studying online from another country. The number of new international students fell by forty-three (43) percent, in part because some chose to defer their studies.  Make no mistake about it, international students will be back after COVID, if COVID is ever controlled.  We have some of the best universities in the world.  Unfortunately, many American students can not do the work due to very poor preparation. 

As always, I welcome your comments.

THE FIFTEEN (15) HOTTEST JOBS FOR 2021 and BEYOND

If you have a son, daughter, or grandchild thinking about a career in engineering, they might want to research what jobs will be the most sought-after over a ten (10) to fifteen (15) year period.  An article was just written in the online magazine “Design News Daily” that gives a comprehensive list of those engineering disciplines that a consensus of opinion says will be the fastest growing with the greatest number of positions available.  Some of these were great surprises to me and I’ve been doing this for over fifty years.  Let’s now take a look at the list.

The two that surprise me the most are “game engineer” and “project engineer”.  These are two that have been added this year due to demand.  With Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality (VI) becoming so in-demand, these classifications have gained enormous popularity within the engineering classifications.  I hope you will spread the word concerning these possibilities.  We need additional engineering talent more than ever in this country and actually over our globe