The Contra Costa Times has a pretty good video of last night's I-580 overpass collapse that is sure to gridlock traffic in San Francisco that on a normal day is tough to navigate. In a terse one sentence advisory, the I-580 traffics condition report urges commuters to seek alternate routes. The collapse caused an inferno from an exploding gasoline truck that failed to negotiate a curve. The disaster is reminscent of the Big Dig ceiling collapse in Boston last summer that tied up traffic for months.
Should a highway be able to withstand such an unusual accident? Indeed, the engineering in the rebuilding of I-880 in Oakland from the 1989 earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter Scale factored in future earthquakes. But how often does a truck explode in California? Comparatively, quite a bit. I was in San Francisco when a gasoline truck exploded inside the Caldecott Tunnel on April 7, 1982, killing seven. In 2001, a truck driver rammed the California state Capital Building with a truck loaded with 65,000 cans of evaporated milk that caught fire.
So funky things like tanker explosions inevitably occur on California highways and byways. Should (or could) a highway be able withstand such an inferno? Hardly. Though, I am not a civil engineer, that would would be tantamount to making them withstand a bombing.
Almost every automaker has had to 'pick a side' when it comes to alternative fuel options and ways to divest from a reliance on gasoline. Fiat is looking to back compressed natural gas or liquid propane as an interim solution.
Plastic may not be the most beloved of materials to the more environmentally minded, but Plasti 2012 aimed to mold a different opinion of the material in people's minds.
The rare earth element market has become steadily more rational, and new sources coming online will continue to reduce costs. Still, it is unlikely that prices will drop to their former lows.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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