CTE: Linking Virtual to Reality
When Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, one fact became apparent amid the chaos: the city’s levees, floodwalls, canals, and pump stations – one of the nation’s most complex flood control systems – became overwhelmed. Within 24 hours, the historic city was engulfed in 14 inches of rain.
Understanding the complicated interaction between the natural and manmade events of the disaster became the mission of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Inter-Agency Performance Evaluation Taskforce (IPET), a distinguished team of government, academic, and private sector scientists and engineers dedicated, solely, to this task. CTE was recruited to develop a highly-sophisticated hydraulic model to simulate the flooding effects of Katrina and evaluate system performance under several extreme scenarios. Using a research version of the Corps’ HEC-RAS modeling software – not yet released to the public – CTE successfully completed this intense forensic engineering study in less than six months, with one of the most extensive unsteady state models ever created for the Corps as the final product.
Within CTE’s Environmental practice, technology is a major player. 3D CADD, widely used at CTE by all disciplines, is even ushering in a fourth dimension – 3D construction schedules. Now, clients and their operations personnel can take a virtual walk through the guts of a project, viewing the piping and mechanical equipment, looking for conflicts – before the project ever leaves the drawing board. Once the project is underway, clients, engineers, and contractors can collaborate on technical issues with a construction schedule that’s transformed, three-dimensionally, on a computer screen.
Sometimes, clients require another critical step, prior to project construction. CTE’s specialized team can construct both computer and “real life” hydraulic scale models to test and validate – or rule out – engineering approaches, before building the real thing.
“In one case, we used a computational fluid dynamics model to determine the need for a replacement pump and piping at a wastewater pumping station,” CTE Vice President Don D’Adam explains. “Another time, we used an actual scale model to validate the problems with an existing pumping system. Both were customized modeling approaches that saved our clients’ money, early in the design process.”
Though technology alone will never prevent another Hurricane Katrina, or rule out the need for basic infrastructure, like a pumping or treatment facility, its mastery allows CTE to apply cutting-edge engineering to real world problems – in essence, experimenting in a virtual world, and then proceeding, innovatively, with the project.
“Through progressive modeling, we can identify, and then substantially reduce, errors and capital costs, before the project becomes animate – or, real. We call this ‘value-added engineering,’” says D’Adam. “And, it’s standard on all of our projects.”
