<p>I was looking for opinions about the future of civil engineering. Over the last few decades there have been many innovations in most engineering fields, especially electrical, computer science, chemical, and biomedical engineering. Civil engineering has been relatively stagnant in comparison. I have also noticed that the civil engineering departments at most top schools are usually smaller than the other engineering departments. Will civil engineering be able to "compete" in the 21st century with the other engineering majors to produce new innovations and attract young talent?</p>
<p>Short answer: no
Long answer: There will ALWAYS be a need for civil engineers. From the lowliest suspension bridge to the great petronas towers, civil engineers had a hand in it all!</p>
<p>There are plenty of innovations in civil engineering; they just not be as sexy to some as the iPod or LCD displays. The big new thing in civil engineering lately has been building information modeling (BIM), which is like super CAD. For example. instead of drawing lines to represent walls, you can actually draw the walls in a file and give it properties. It may not seem like much, but it'll do wonders in terms of streamlining the process from the architect to the engineer to the contractor. </p>
<p>On the construction side, the bulk of the research is aimed at increasing efficiency one way or another. CMU is at the forefront of implementing sensors to detect defects in structures. Stanford has researched heavily in global project management (and Columbia is beginning to head in the same direction) because of the increasing number of projects using players from all over the world. It's an emerging field that few people have really looked into. There is STILL a lot of other research going on because even today, construction management is chock full of inefficiencies and is far from an exact science. If you look at some of the papers that have been published, a lot of it have to do with risk management. Contractors have one of the highest business failure rates in this country, so people are always trying to figure out a way to make this field more predictable.</p>
<p>Structural engineering…. I'll leave this to aibarr, since this is her thing, but I'll mention that since Oklahoma City and 9/11, blast resistant design has becoming more popular. </p>
<p>Geotechnical engineering… where is there NOT work to be done? It's probably the most inexact out of all the civil engineering sub-disciplines, which you can see by some of the high safety factors used here.</p>
<p>Basically, research/innovation in civil engineering is more about improving current methodologies and materials rather than creating something new. I don't think these innovations are anywhere as exciting as in the other fields, but most civil engineers who have a passion in this field don't look for excitement there. As Luminaire mentioned, you get your joy from the projects where you the innovations get implemented, and not from the steel that now has a 14 ksi greater yield strength. </p>
<p>I suspect that the difference in enrollment at top schools is due to the differences in salaries. I know a few people who wanted to major in civil engineering but were pressured into doing electrical engineering because of the higher salary. Nevertheless, there are approximately the same number of practicing electrical engineers and civil engineers in the u.s. (approx. 250k each).</p>
<p>EDIT: oh, I've heard from some international students that civil engineers have high prestige in some parts of the world and they were surprised to find out it wasn't the case in the u.s. they said it was comparable to that of a lawyer (in France i think?). just found that interesting.</p>
<p>In terms of pure research a la PhD/academia, i think there are significantly fewer people than in other fields. In my year, a few students went on to do PhDs in EE, ME, and ChE, but NONE in CE. I'm wondering if anybody has any numbers about the number of PhD students in each of the engineering disciplines. I'd be very interested in finding this out.</p>
<p>Why fewer? Probably for the exact reason the OP is concerned about. There just aren't that many sexy innovations in CE, and if there are, it's not widely known outside of practicing professionals.</p>
<p>Totally cool things coming up in civil engineering.</p>
<p>Like Ken said, BIM is huge. My firm uses Revit (probably the most popular building information modeling suite out there) extensively, and we're currently the industry leaders in it. I think the new Cowboys stadium was a BIM project... (I'd have to root around on our network to confirm that, though.) There's something about letting your client motor around their new building before it's built that's really profitable. =)</p>
<p>One thing that I've thought was awesome that we were messing around with in my old firm was doing seismic steel connections using nitinol (memory metal... anybody have those eyeglasses where you can bend them and knot them up and they just sproing back into place? that's nitinol)... Earthquake bends the heck out of them and they just snap back into place.</p>
<p>There's some really sweet stuff about active damping, using tuned mass dampers and some newer fluid damping systems to reduce sway in buildings, and even to predict the motions of earthquakes and prevent motion within the building.</p>
<p>Finite element analysis is becoming more and more practical every day, which allows us to do more and more cutting-edge stuff with steel and concrete. Notice lately that buildings out there are getting taller and curvier? Sexy buildings happen because of better computation tools.</p>
<p>We're looking at some awesome things with fiber reinforced polymers.... Fiberglass + resin as a building material. It's pretty sweet, and it's in the early stages. We're starting to figure it out.</p>
<p>I also recently saw something about rapid prototyping of full-scale structures... Stick a machine on the site and print yourself out a house. It was really crazy.</p>
<p>That's just off the top of my head... Lots of stuff coming up. We're just trying to figure out what's practical. Until these things become cheap, they're not going to be widespread, but there are folks out there pushing the boundaries. It's changing, it's just that most of what you see out there are the typical concrete and steel buildings, and it doesn't look all that different to people not in the industry.</p>
<p>Ken, I don't have specific numbers, but I get the impression that the number of civs who go from masters (useful in practical situations) to doctorates (only really useful in academia and research) is significantly lower than in other fields, where if you're going into practice a bachelors is usually sufficient... Still, there <em>are</em> quite a few doctoral folks in civil engineering out there, and they're doing some cool (though occasionally completely incomprehensible) research.</p>
<p>At UIUC:
Summary</a> of Engineering Research | Engineering at Illinois | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Click on the summary in pdf format link, then there's a link for civ research going on right now. (The Mid-America Earthquake Center stuff was what I worked on when I was there.)</p>
<p>A lot of why there's not as much innovation is that buildings are expensive, so a lot of research money is put into making what we've got last longer, rather than making the next generation of whatevers better. Calculators last ten or fifteen years, and if yours breaks you curse loudly and go to Best Buy. Electrical engineers will have made you a neater, better one. Buildings last fifty, sixty, seventy-five years, and if yours breaks you curse loudly, hire a failure analyst, and try to see how much longer you can get out of it without putting in a whole lot of money.</p>
<p>Still, there's cool stuff on the horizon.
Also, I wish I had the prestige of a lawyer in France. Unless, and the international students may have left out this part, I were to find that lawyers in France have no prestige...! ;)</p>
<p>People have been predicting the end of mechanical and civil engineering for decades. Sure the stuff hasn't changed in forever, and there are new technologies that make the works easier and easier, but there will always be a need for the engineers to analyze, design and actually use the softwares.</p>
<p>Lawyers have prestige anywhere?</p>
<p>I hold an engineer in higher esteem than a lawyer by FAR.</p>
<p>I don't know anyone personally who has an esteem for a lawyer. A lawyer...well, is a lawyer.</p>
<p>I would like to thank everyone who responded to this thread. I am considering a career related to civil engineering research and this thread has made me feel better about the potential for innovation in civil engineering.</p>
<p>Not sure about the Cowboys stadium, but the Washington Nationals ballpark was a BIM project. I'm pretty sure the Soldier's Field renovation in Chicago was a BIM project as well, but I don't seen anything online about it.</p>
<p>I think the coolest part is where you add the 4th dimension of time to these models. You can see what the planned construction sequencing is, and it can help you identify problem areas of congestion.</p>
<p>I looked in our project folder, and we have a wazooload of Revit files for the Cowboys Stadium, so I'm fairly certain that it was BIM. If not, we went back after the fact and rigged it up so that we could use BIM for clash detection (and coolness). Also saw that the new Twins ballpark is being done up with BIM. Lots of cool stuff...!</p>
<p>When you get to graduate level, much of Civil engineering/structural engineering research is heavily specialized and in many cases is really just mechanics of materials research, which can cut across a large number of fields. Other fields of research involve rocking structures, vibrating structures, liquefaction of soils during earthquakes, hydrological research etc and many others - the public just do not get to see these in the same way as common electronic consumer products.</p>
<p>Computational mechanics is another area of research that Civils often get involved in. Obviously at graduate level there will be overlap with other disciplines - especially mechanical and engineering science.</p>
<p>The field of Earthquake Engineering and Seismic design is of course the one that has made the most strides over the past 40 to 50 years. Seismic design is something that the public does not see everyday, and will not know the benefits of until a major earthquake happens.</p>
<p>The Finite Element method is perhaps one of the most important advances in engineering over the past 40 years. It is now used to solve a multiplicity of all types of engineering problems. Its earliest uses were in structural engineering and two of its most important pioneers and earliest practitioners were Olgierd Zienkiewicz and Clough, Civil engineers. R. W. Clough, Earthquake Engineering Research Center </p>
<p>So, there has been plenty of important research and advances in Civil /Structural - only the public will understandably be more aware of electrical and mechanical innovations such as the DVD, PCs and jet planes. Advances in materials science, structural mechanics and FEM, while extremely important, will go unnoticed by non-engineers.</p>
<p>Civil is not a glamorous field in the US and UK, but is in Europe especially Eastern Europe, the mid East and most of Asia.
(By the way, Revit and Autocad cannot be considered to be CE advances)</p>
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<p>Oh, c'mon. We're talking about things that are advancing the industry. Yeah, we're behind mechs and aeros in integrated information modeling and they had it first, but it's an advancement that's going to revolutionize the field.</p>