A civil engineer's education primarily focuses on technical knowledge, which is vital for addressing the technical challenges of our society's infrastructures need and advancing the innovative tools we use to develop them. However, an equally important aspect of professional practice is ethics—understanding what is right and wrong.

Anchored wind turbine foundations work beautifully when they do, but when they don’t, they are a nightmare. That’s why “to anchor or not to anchor” is a fundamental question that has to be thoroughly evaluated when contemplating an anchored wind turbine foundation. In this post, we discuss this efficient wind turbine foundation system and why it should be reserved to particular geotechnical settings.

Mother Nature handed out several invaluable lessons over the last two weeks of May 2024: on May 17, strong weather events downed multiple transmission line towers in the Houston area, and on May 20-21, tornadoes destroyed several wind turbines in southwest Iowa. What lessons should we draw from these back-to-back events? Is this a wake-up call? If it is, what is the message of the call? What are the consequences associated with these types of failures and what are the weak links in our nation’s power system? Do we need to rethink how we design wind turbines, or do we need to work harder to slow down the accelerating pattern of more frequent and more extreme weather events? Let’s explore!

US stakeholders are invited to offer input on IEC design standards relative to wind turbine support structures and their foundations through the US mirror committee coordinated by Jomaa Ben Hassine. Current activity includes Amendment 1 and Edition 2 of IEC 61400-6. Find out how to get involved in this community blog entry.

“ACI Code-323 Low-Carbon Concrete - Code Requirements and Commentary” is a draft ACI standard currently open for public discussion from March 31 to May 15, 2024. So, what’s Low-Carbon Concrete (LCC) and how does this Code propose to achieve it?

With the first batch of utility-scale wind projects built in the first years of this millennium reaching their 20-year design life, there is increased interest in repowering through life extension and remaining life assessments. What if the question of expected service life had been considered during project design? Well, now there is an ACI design specification intended just for the purpose of providing minimum requirements for performing a service life prediction for new concrete structures. Public comments are being sought on ACI CODE-365. Read more about it here.