The job market is tough out there across North America, especially in the United States.  Although some types of jobs are opening up – medical, engineering and food service fields specifically – it has still been difficult for many to find places to work in this hard economic state.  However, if an engineer is finding no open positions in his/her area, they may want to look towards Asia.

Recently, there has been a construction boom out in India that is seeking civil engineers and designers for help in building high rise apartment buildings and the like.  The shortage has developed out of a lack of Indian graduates moving into those fields – instead graduates are working in the information technology field, which is always seeking in India.  According to the Economic Times the salary for someone in civil engineering versus someone in information technology is roughly half, causing a serious shortage:

“Infrastructure problems ranging from dirt roads to power cuts are a major obstacle to India’s future growth, and the government plans to spend one trillion dollars on upgrades between 2012 and 2017. India has jealously watched China’s remarkable economic development over the last 20 years, which has been made possible by huge and successful public construction projects. Experts however warn that India faces a massive shortfall of qualified civil engineers. Delhi’s new metro system is one shining example of the type of project that would be welcomed across India. But when a new stretch of track opened before the Commonwealth Games, the chief of the project E. Sreedharan complained bitterly about a ‘severe shortage of architectural and civil engineers.’”

This story highlights the importance of all kinds of engineers across the world.  Not having enough civil engineers may stall India’s movement towards growth in years to come and that would be a shame.

Laser technology in the fields of engineering and land surveying is sweeping across the country. By using lasers to map coordinates, shapes and elements of an area that will be constructed upon, engineers can quickly, accurately and effectively capture the full breadth of an area. Laser scanners produce point clouds that can be turned into 3D or even 2D models of buildings and landscapes that can be used for planning and other data collection. Laser technology is definitely the future of engineering and surveying and schools are jumping on the bandwagon with high tech engineering firms.

For instance, this technology is being taught at the Nova Scotia Community College in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, according to The Chronicle Herald. Students at the school are learning how to use the laser scanning tools to create models of structures automatically from hard resin, instead of paper. The article explains the process:

“Brandon Smith, a mechanical engineering instructor, waves a laser wand around an angular piece of metal in a workshop at the Nova Scotia Community College in Dartmouth. A few metres away, the information from the laser sensor appears on a computer screen, slowly building into a three-dimensional replica of the object, which was once part of an airplane. That computer image will be fed into a large “printer” on the other side of the room and in a matter of hours, an exact three-dimensional replica of the part — made of a hard resin material, not paper — will be produced for the aviation company IMP.”

This type of process would have taken weeks without the technology now available to students studying engineering in schools all over the world. The article goes on to say that the skills associated with using these types of tools will help students get acclimated with real-world “customers, deadlines and engineering challenges.”

In this blog, we have discussed the usage of laser technology to create 3-D models of buildings to help aid engineers with recommendations for land that is complex and time consuming to survey with standard engineering tools. Technology is one of the major backbones of engineering and 3-D imagery is just one of the newest techniques for making the science of engineering more precise and accurate.

Using lasers as the “eyes of an engineer” can be a very effective way of determining how a structure needs to be fixed in order to achieve maximum stability and long lasting structural integrity. A 3-D scan provides engineers with a model that looks very similar to the computer generated imagery used in the classic movie “Tron.” Using this technology paired with the engineering skills gained from the study of math and science, engineers can interpret a model and make recommendations to clients. This process also saves a massive amount of time for engineers, who would normally have to manually make measurements on difficult pieces of land.

This process isn’t just used for scanning areas of land and current building structures, but also used for restoring old ships, according to this blog entry from Gizmodo. The entry speaks about the restoration of the world’s last great whaling ship, the Charles W. Morgan. The wooden ship was scanned with lasers and X-ray technology to determine where its weak spots are, so that a $10 million restoration could begin.

According to the piece, the boat should be restored by 2012, but that whaling will not be possible. At this point, the boat will be preserved for history’s sake. Without 3-D scanning technology, the last whaling boat in the world would be gone forever.