Question No. 01
Did any of the Egyptian pyramids ever fall down?
Answer: Yes, many did. The great pyramid and others that have survived did so for a reason. Their shapes made them sturdier over time and were not the first design. Many steppe pyramids were built but were too steep and as the corners eroded, the whole pyramid fell under its own weight. They were built too steep and did not have the base structure as seen in the great pyramid.
Question No. 02
In designing mini-piles, should the strength of grout be neglected during assessment of loading carrying capacity?
Answer: In designing min-piles, there are two approaches available:
(i) In the first approach, the axial resistance provided by the grout is neglected and steel bars take up the design loads only. This approach is a conservative one which leads to the use of high strength bars e.g. Dywidag bar. One should note that bending moment is not designed to be taken up by min-piles because of its slender geometry.
(ii) In the second approach, it involves loads to be taken up by both grout and steel bars together. In this way, strain compatibility requirement of grout and steel has to be satisfied.
Question No. 03
What are the functions of cap block, drive cap and pile cushion in driven piles?
Answer: Cap block is installed between the hammer end and the drive cap to control the hammer blow in order to protect both the hammer and the pile from damage. When the hammer hits the cap block, it compresses elastically and reduces the peak forces, thereby lengthening the time of hammer blow. Moreover, it should be capable of transmitting the hammer energy effectively to the piles.
Drive cap is inserted at hammer tip to enhance uniform distribution of hammer energy to the pile. Pile cushion is positioned between the drive cap and the pile top. It intends to protect the pile from driving stress induced during hammer blows. Moreover, it also serves to provide a uniform driving load on top of the pile.
Question No. 04
What are the methods to tackle negative skin friction?
Answer:
(i) Use slender pile sections (e.g. H-pile or precast pile) because smaller pile area when subject to the same working load would produce higher deformation, thus increasing the relative downward movement of piles.
(ii) In a certain region of H-piles for ground water table fluctuation, painting is applied on the surface of H-piles because the rise and fall of water table contribute to the corrosion of H-piles. On the other hand, to reduce the effect of additional loads brought about by negative skin friction, bitumen is applied on the pile surface corresponding to the region of soils that has negative skin friction. However, bitumen should not be applied to the whole section of H-piles because it would be unable to derive the designed frictional reaction from soils.
(iii) Design the piles as end-bearing so that they can take up more loads.
Question No. 05
How do you determine Specific gravity of cement?
Answer: Cement is usually purchased as a powdery substance that is mixed with sand, aggregate, gravel, and water to form concrete. Since the cement itself is usually a powder, it is hard to measure a standard value for its specific gravity. In addition, since cement is usually not used by itself, knowing its specific gravity is not particularly useful. A more useful question is “What is the typical density of concrete?” A rule of thumb answer is that normal cured concrete has a density of about 150 pounds per cubic foot. This includes the weight of the cement, sand, aggregate, and that Part of the water that chemically binds with the cement to form the concrete. Since water weighs about 62.4 pounds per cubic feet, concrete is about 2.4 times as heavy. Thus, the specific gravity of concrete is about 2.4. If you took cement and mixed it with water, you would eventually have a hard lump of useless cement and it would also have a specific gravity of between 2 and 2.4.
Question No. 06
How and where are aqueducts built?
Answer: Aqueducts are built in areas where you have a bunch of motivated end users (like a town or group of farmers) at a low elevation in need of a more reliable source of water located somewhere fairly nearby at a higher elevation. The aqueduct builders construct a series of canals, elevated channels, and tunnels as required to get the water from the source to the end users. Some good examples:
a) Roman engineers built aqueducts throughout Italy and France from mountain water sources to serve city dwellers
b) Water-needy Southern California cities and farms are served by an aqueduct that brings them water from sources in Northern California
c) New York City is supplied by an aqueduct and tunnel system from sources upstate.
d) Inca farmers in coastal valleys built irrigation aqueducts from sources higher up in the Rockies
e) Native American cultures in Phoenix area built irrigation canal systems that diverted water from sources at higher elevations to irrigate their crops.
Question No. 07
What is the meaning of blue land survey flag ?
Answer: If the flag was placed by Utility personnel responding to a “One-call” locate request, the blue flag indicates a buried water line. You see these marked when a contractor calls the “Call before you dig number” a couple of days prior to excavating. This is required by law in each state to reduce the likelihood of damaging underground utilities when excavating. The standard color code used by almost all utility companies for Painting & flags is:
• White -Here is the area I plan on excavating!
• Blue -water line
• Red -electricity
• Yellow -natural gas
• Green -sewer
Orange -telephone and/or fiber optic line
If the blue flagging was a fuzzy blue marker nailed to the top of a wood surveyor’s stake, then it probably serves to indicate the top of the grade at which the engineer wants the earthmoving equipment to place fill dirt. These are called “blue-top” stakes.
Question No. 08
What are advancements in civil engineering?
Answer: Unlike other fields of engineering, the major advancement of the field has been in the early years of the century before the last century where the use of concrete technology is advanced. The use of cement as a construction material is since the turn of the last century, improvement in the field increase by the use of steel elements in the construction of buildings and bridges of various types. With the help of two, it was possible to do multi-story buildings in the world. Machineries were created to speed up the construction structures. The last century has also seen the advent of sophisticated design to withstand the effect of earthquake that was not possible before. With the use of computers, development of model and analysis of structures under the effect of loads was made possible. Before just two decades, it used to take months and months to design high-rise building and big bridges. Now it is a matter of hours.
Question No. 09
How did the Romans get water up hills using aqua ducts?
Answer: Technically, the Romans were not able to get water to move uphill in a general sense. All aqueducts move water from an elevated source (spring-fed streams in the mountains) to end-users at a lower elevation. The water flows almost entirely from the source to the end user. If the water needed to cross a valley, the Romans would build an arched structure with an elevated channel to cross the valley, but even this channel would have a very slight downhill gradient that allowed water to flow towards the end user. If a large hill was in their way, the Romans would either divert the channel around the hill, dig a trench through the hill, or dig a tunnel through the hill, all while maintaining a fairly constant, slight downhill gradient towards the end user.
The only exception to the rule of a generally constant downhill slope to the water channel is that specific tunnel segments, the Romans could build the tunnel as an inverted siphon (mentioned above) to cross a depression or valley and raise the water level on the downhill side almost to the level of the uphill side. To do this requires a well-sealed tunnel strong enough to withstand the increased water pressure within the siphon. Note, however, that except for gaining a little bit of elevation if you slow down fast-moving water, you normally cannot get water to flow out of the outlet at a higher elevation than the inlet. So technically, even the Romans were not able to get water to flow “up a hill”.
Question No. 10
What is the difference between QA and QC?
Answer: Many people and organizations are confused about the difference between quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC), and testing. They are closely related, but they are different concepts. Since all three are necessary to manage the risks of developing and maintaining software, it is important for software managers to understand the differences. They are defined below:
a) Quality Assurance: A set of activities designed to ensure that the development and/or maintenance process is adequate to ensure a system will meet its objectives.
b) Quality Control: A set of activities designed to evaluate a developed work product.
c) Testing is the process of executing a system with the intent of finding defects. (Note that the “process of executing a system” includes test planning prior to the execution of the test cases.)