and engineering principles. These three professions have a responsibility to work together to create strong, lasting, and appealing structures for people.
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| Solar panels represent one of environmental engineering’s most notable inventions. Solar panels, like these in Spain, have led the renewable energy movement by taking advantage of the massive amount of the Sun’s energy that irradiates the Earth every day. Advances in solar panel technology will consist of higher efficiency solar collectors, thin solar films, and nanoscale solar chips that might be embedded in window glass. (Fernando Tomás) |
Design involves the use of technical drawing skills so that a designer can show a customer what a new structure will look like before it has been built. This craft of producing accurate and precise images of a planned structure is called drafting, and it consists of two types: manual drafting and computer-aided drafting. More than 200 years ago, new shops,
barns, and houses began with a sketch of all the rooms, entrances, windows, and other pieces of the building. As society desired larger and more complex buildings, the drafting profession needed to produce drawings depicting exact measurements with all components in proportion to each other. To do this a drafter uses a drafting table and a set of drafting tools: T square straightedge, triangle, French curve, and compass. A T square is a T-shaped ruler, and a triangle is three rulers connected into a single triangular straightedge tool. A French curve also lies flat on the drafting table, but this tool contains a variety of curved shapes rather than straight edges. The drafter can trace an almost infinite variety of curved lines using a French curve. A compass is a two-legged instrument that enables a drafter to draw a perfect circle of a specific diameter; one compass leg holds a sharp point that anchors the circle’s axis while the other leg holds a pencil for drawing a circle around the axis.
Manual drafting has given way to the use of computers to assist engineers, designers, and architects. Each profession relies on a computer technology called computer-aided design (CAD), which allows users to draw three-dimensional pictures on a computer screen. The drafter or designer views each CAD drawing on the screen and can rotate the image in any orientation to view the proposed structure’s front, back, sides, top, and bottom, and from any angle. CAD uses a technology called virtual reality, which is a computer capability that creates artificial three-dimensional views. Put another way, a CAD user can view the interior or the exterior of a house from any perspective, just as if they were walking through the
house or looking at it from outside. Virtual reality helps people imagine exactly what a structure will be, while it helps engineers evaluate proposed plans, detect structural flaws, and test the effects of weather, erosion, or seismic change.
CAD plays a twofold role in environmental engineering. First, CAD converts any hand sketch into a realistic drawing that obeys the laws of engineering. Second, CAD speeds design processes by allowing engineers to print a number of prototype designs, update any design
to include the best features, and then reconstruct the new object into a three-dimensional
image. The architect Michel Lewis said of CADmaker Autodesk, “We can look at a design from all points of view and see the relationship between all our structures. Our digital model allows us to see every single detail, and to make changes really quickly. Without
Autodesk, we would be working for another century and would not be able to achieve the degree of sustainability we wanted in this project [Playa Viva resort in Mexico].” Advances in CAD will continue to lead the way in environmental engineering.
