3 New Civil Engineering Trends

Civil Engineering is a field that has quietly advanced in methodology and technology as other, more rapidly developing fields such as Biotech and IT grabs headlines. However, the world of building infrastructure continues on a steady march to innovating new ideas on how to be more effective and efficient in the realm of construction materials and methods. According to CivilJungle, here are three upcoming trends:

Self-Healing Concrete

Concrete cracks remains a major defect in construction material to this day. Researchers from Bath University have created a mix of bacteria and concrete to develop a material that can self-heal. When water enters cracks form by natural wear in the concrete, the bacterial concrete will self-germinate and extract limestone in the process. This organic limestone mixture then helps to plug the crack before water has a chance to infiltrate and corrode any steel rods encased within.

Photovoltaic Glazing

Polydoris is a company that is manufacturing transparent photovoltaic glass. Large office windows already catch a lot of sunlight and more often than not - do little other than reflecting that energy back to the environment, warming the ambient temperature of the city further. Photovaic glazing is a new method of integrating photovoltaic technology into clear glass so those windows can produce energy instead of just deflecting it. Although still in small scale adoption due to cost, the technology has the potential to turn entire office buildings into massive solar farms.

Modular Construction

Although pre-fabricated building blocks have been around for decades, there has been a recent surge in modular construction amongst environmentally-friendly organizations. In this method of construction, all the necessary parts of the facility is manufactured in easy-to-assemble blocks off-site, before being transported to its permanent location. This method of construction is environmentally sustainable because there is very little machinery involved at the site of construction, only a quick assembly. The mass production of identical pre-fabricated modules also helps the construction company to cut on costs.