Civil and Environmental Engineering

Civil and Environmental Engineering at the School of Engineering

University Court has committed funding for a major new School of Engineering building at its Meeting on Monday 30 September 2019. At a cost of £33.5m, work on Engineering Module 1 will commence in spring 2020 and is due to be completed in summer 2022. The development at the south west corner of the King’s Buildings campus will host new classrooms, research spaces and computer labs, alongside the offices of the Head of School and Professional Services, and Engineering Teaching Organisation, over an area of 6,500 sqm on five floors.

Architect's image of Engineering Module 1 (Copyright: BDP)

The School of Engineering is part of a network of leading UK universities and international industry bodies aiming to accelerate the switch to green energy and propulsion across road, rail, sea and air freight modes. Three academics from our School are representing the University of Edinburgh in the network: Dr Ignazio Maria Viola who is Co-Investigator on the project, alongside Professor Steve Finney and Professor Markus Müller – all from the School’s Institute for Energy Systems (IES).

The Decarbonising the UK’s Freight Transport Network brings together over forty academic and industry partners including researchers from our School

Dr Rory Hadden has been working with engineers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland, USA, the US Forest Service, and New Jersey Forest Fire Service to observe the behaviour of forest fires from within using a 360-degree water-cooled camera. The cutting-edge equipment provides scientists and engineers with the ability to see inside prescribed fires and potentially wildfires using virtual reality technologies together with footage captured using the 360-degree camera.

Forest fire seen from the sky

Our HYPED team recently travelled to Los Angeles, California to compete in the international SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition 2019 on Sunday 21 June 2019. Following months of preparation, the team and their hyperloop pod protoype ‘The Flying Podsman’ journeyed over 5,000 miles to SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne to compete alongside 20 of the best hyperloop teams in the world.

'The Flying Podsman': HYPED's 2019 hyperloop pod prototye, at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition in California

Nikolai Gerasimov, a postgraduate researcher in the School’s BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering, has won a Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers (WCSIM) research grant for an innovative advance in fire performance testing. The awards are given in recognition of projects which involve innovative scientific development, and enable recipients to become Society of Instrument Maker (SIM) Scholars.

Nikolai Gerasimov, who is a postgraduate researcher in the School’s BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering

Civil Engineering alumnus Kal Turnbull has recently attracted media attention for his idea to improve the quality of online conversations. Kal is co-founder and CEO of online platform ChangeAView.com, a startup which aims to promote thoughtful debate on online platforms. The company started with an idea which came to Kal when he was a 17-year-old teenager living in the Highlands. Feeling that he might “grown up in a bit of a small-town bubble”, Kal started a new group on the online discussion form Reddit, called Change My View.

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