Archive for the 'Engineers Australia' Category

ARR Seminars

This announcement is a repost from the AR&R team.

Speaker: Grantley Smith, UNSW Water Research Laboratory (WRL)

Grantley Smith is a Senior Engineer at the University of New South Wales Water Research Laboratory. He has over 20 years’ experience in hydrological processes as they relate to flow forecasting floodplain hydraulics, and floodplain management. Prior to joining the WRL in 2009, Grantley was NSW State Manager for DHI Water and Environment where he helped pioneer the use of 2D hydrodynamic models for floodplain inundation. He is currently Chair of the Water Panel for the Sydney Division of Engineers Australia.

Project 15: 2D Modelling in Urban Areas

The presentation will provide an overview of recent research undertaken as part of Project 15 of the Australian Rainfall and Runoff Revision and funded by the Federal Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency and WRL. The research project investigated the application of 2D models in urban areas, with a particular focus on the representation of buildings and other floodplain flow obstacles in numerical models.

A PDF flyer is available.

Project 10: People and Vehicle Stability in Floods

This presentation reviews the early work, collates and discusses subsequent experimental testing, empirical expressions and safety guidelines derived from these studies. The entire data-set of relevant experimental results is re-analysed and tolerable flow conditions related to human and vehicle safety and safe working conditions are presented.

A PDF flyer is available.

Perth
Date: Monday, 13 February 2012
Time: 12.00pm
Place: Auditorium Engineers Australia
712 Murray St, West Perth
RSVP: Not Required
Cost: Free

Hobart
Date: Tuesday, 13 March 2012
Time: 12.15pm (light lunch provided)
12.30pm to 2.00pm Seminar
Place: Old Woolstore Theatrette
1 Macquarie Street, Hobart
RSVP: To Catherine Reading 6234 2228 or HIDDEN EMAIL by no later than
Tuesday, 6 March 2012

Brisbane and Melbourne Seminar dates to be advised

Design Aspects of a SWRO Desalination Plant

This is a cross post from the Sydeny Mechanical Chapter as the topic may be of interest to the Water Panel’s membership.

Design of a major seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant poses many challenges to engineers of various disciplines particularly those of process and mechanical backgrounds. These challenges include meeting or exceeding the contracted energy efficiency targets, addressing durability of materials in a seawater environment, ensuring safety of piping and equipment operating at high fluid pressures and design to meet sometime conflicting constructability, operability and maintainability requirements. This presentation will briefly outline the design aspects of pressure driven membranes, energy recovery, material selection for protection against corrosion and piping.

The recently completed Sydney Desalination Plant has provided Dennis Cho and Con Sikallos with valuable experiences and insights arising form their involvement for over three years in the bid, design delivery and commissioning phases. Dennis will review the basis of design of a desalination plant and Con will present some of the mechanical challenges.

Dennis is a senior process engineer at SKM and has completed his PhD at UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology at University of NSW. His work is based on over 10 years of engineering experience, largely in the water and wastewater industry.

Con has 20 years of experience in the water and wastewater industry and currently holds a senior mechanical engineering position at SKM. He has been involved in many engineering projects from detail design through to commissioning including the Sydney Desalination Plant.

Date: 16-06-2011
Starting: Light refreshments at 6.00pm for a 6.30pm start
Finishing: 7.40 to 7.50pm
Dinner Option: With the speaker at 8.00pm, at a nearby restaurant (at cost)
Venue: Engineers Australia Auditorium, Ground Floor, 8 Thomas Street, Chatswood

All contact to: Andrew Lowe would be appreciated, phone no (02) 9777 1111 or HIDDEN EMAIL.

Full details: PDF Flyer.

EA Eminent Speaker: Flood and Storm Surge Levees

EA is hosting a talk by Dr Dr Steven Hughes from Colorado State University (USA) on Flood and Storm Surge Levees – design, maintenance & performance in particular how it relates to the failures during Hurricane Katrina. See the PDF flyer and the EA blurb below:

Dr Hughes is the Senior Research Scientist for Colorado State University, USA and is an international expert in the research and policy of Flood and Storm Surge Levees. He will be speaking on the timely topic of Flood and Storm Surge Levees – design, maintenance and performance and drawing on his experiences in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina.

Monday 16th May
Time: 5.30pm for 6pm Start
Auditorium, Engineers Australia Sydney Division, 8 Thomas St, Chatswood

Seats limited to 130 – please book online early!

Please RSVP online HERE or see the attached flyer for further details.

Please note: this presentation is hosted by EA and not the Panel event. If you do attend please confirm as the last presentation we advertised for EA was cancelled at the last minute with no warning.

Environmental Award for Rainwater Thesis

According to a recent EA release Benjamin Taylor of USQ won the National Student Environmental Engineering and Sustainability Award:

University of Southern Queensland postgraduate student Benjamin Taylor has been presented with the 2010 National Student Environmental Engineering and Sustainability Award from Engineers Australia’s Society for Sustainability and Environmental Engineering. He received the award for his graduate research project Rapid estimation of rainwater yield throughout Australia and review of Queensland rainwater harvesting operating policy.

Source: EA News

WSUD and Flooding: 35th EEA Stormwater Management Workshop

A 2-day Workshop entitled “Stormwater Management (source control)” has been organised by EEA (Engineering Education, Australia) for Thursday/Friday 17/18 March, 2011 in Sydney. The Notes provided in the course are based on content of the award-winning manual “WSUD: basic procedures for ‘source control’ of stormwater – a Handbook for Australian practice” edited by Professor John Argue (University of South Australia). This document is endorsed by Stormwater Industry Association (SIA), Australian Water Association (AWA) and by Dept of Water, Western Australia. The Notes have been regularly updated since first publication in 2004

The content features a balance between the three domains of WSUD (stormwater) practice – quantity control, pollution control and stormwater harvesting. Serious issues of stormwater management in Australia are posed by the prospect of 35 million population by 2050. How will Sydney’s existing stormwater infrastructure cope with change to selected regions under the ‘high rise’ option being proposed as the likely re-development scenario? What strategies can be adopted to enable existing (competently-performing) infrastructure to cope with this scenario without expensive upgrade? How can re-development in catchments with existing under-performing stormwater infrastructure be managed to enable the in-ground works to progressively meet greater capacity demand without expensive upgrade? Must the creeks and natural waterways on Sydney’s northern, western and southern perimeters be sacrificed to hard-lining in the wake of the proposed expansion? Positive, strategic answers to these and many other questions based on WSUD ‘source control’ practices will be provided in the Workshop.

The Workshop will also include results of hydrological modelling that provides a ‘design front-end’ for use in the MUSIC model. The pollution control practice presented takes advantage of enhanced treatment available in parent soil masses. The fate of dissolved pollutants is singled out for particular attention.

The short course includes: design procedures based on state-of-the-art analyses and best overseas practices adapted to Australia-wide conditions; case study illustrations drawn from field installations with between ten and 18 years of Australian operational history; design ‘worked examples’; introduction and access to rainwater tank sizing software applicable across Australia. The Workshop will be led by Professor John Argue.

Attendance at the Workshop earns 32 hours credit for continuing professional development purposes with Engineers Australia. More information about the workshop including course content, cost and Registration Forms may be obtained from Ms Ann Ellis on (03) 9326 9777 or HIDDEN EMAIL

ARR Update February 2011

The article below is reposted from the AR&R admin team, for full details check out their website.

Call for Reviewers
Those interested in reviewing projects should email HIDDEN EMAIL briefly describing which projects they are interested in reviewing and what qualifications/experience they have in those practice areas.

Draft Chapters
Draft chapters of the new edition are placed on the website as they become available. Industry is reminded that the current edition of ARR puts the responsibility on practitioners to stay abreast of current research/best practice and not to use out dated techniques even when documented in ARR. It also explains that ARR is not to be treated as a standard where compliance with the published document constitutes acceptable practice. The draft flood frequency chapter of the new version of ARR is currently available. The introduction and chapter on peak flow estimation are expected to be released December 2011. www.arr.org.au/doc_drafts4download.html

Project Updates
-Project 10 (People Safety) was extended to investigate Vehicle stability during flood events. The Literature review conducted by WRL is now available on the website http://www.arr.org.au/Website_links/ARR_Project_10_Stage2_Report_Final.pdf

General Updates
Climate Change-
Engineers Australia with the Assistance of BoM and CSIRO are developing their climate change strategy which will outline research necessary to define the impact of climate change on design rainfall, losses, temporal patterns etc.

Website-
We have received a number emails about the menus on the website. The website is standards compliant. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer is not even close to standards compliance and while every effort has been made to ensure that all the pages herein are visible with Internet Explorer there may be some small discrepancies. If you are having serious problems there are a number of excellent open source and proprietary browsers that are standards complaint and will render these pages correctly, for example Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari. Updating your Internet Explorer version may remove the problem. If this doesn’t work please use the site map link at the bottom of the page.

Regards
The ARR Revision Team

Eminent Speakers Presentation: Roger and Jean Venables

Engineers Australia, in conjunction with AGIC is pleased to host joint Eminent Speakers, Roger & Jean Venables, both sustainability experts in civil engineering from the UK.

Please see the attached flyers for details & link for online registration.

Both Roger & Jean will present in Sydney (1st Nov), Melbourne (3rd Nov) & Perth (4th Nov)

Jean only will be presenting in Brisbane on the 28th Oct as part of the SSEE AGM & Dinner – separate registration & costs apply – see the flyer attached.

Further details: http://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/eminentspeaker/

EA: Adequate and secure water supplies

Engineers Australia have called for the water engineering industries thoughts to be included in a submission to the Productivity Commission Inquiry. The original note published by EA is mirrored below for your information:

Most Australians, particularly urban dwellers, regard adequate and secure water as a basic right. Yet we know that water utilities have been struggling to satisfy the needs of present populations with severe water restrictions in place in many urban areas for prolonged periods. Governments have been sufficiently nervous to invest in water desalination plants, long regarded as one of the more expensive options for adding to water supplies.

Engineers Australia put out an excellent publication on sensitive urban water design some years ago. Support for the theme of this work was reflected in the online survey of members. About 85% of members thought that it would be difficult to exceptionally difficult for present centrally supplied water systems to meet the needs of an increased population. Yet 75% thought that it was relatively straight forward or not particularly difficult to supplement central water supplied with local water solutions. How do we get across the messages of total water cycle management to the public? To political leaders? What can we do to make better use of existing central water supply systems? What happened to recycling? Why has it gone off the boil?

These issues are central to Engineers Australia’s submission to the population strategy process. As well we need to get our thoughts together to prepare for the Productivity Commission Inquiry into Urban Water Systems later this year (November 2010).

Maritime Panel: Half Day Seminar on Legislation and Impacts

The Institution of Engineers Australia – Sydney Division Maritime Panel in association with PIANC, present:

Half Day Seminar: Changes to NSW Coastal Protection Legislation and Implications for Coastal Protection in NSW

  • Session 1 – Policy and Legislation
  • Session 2 – Emergency Measures
  • Session 3 – Coastal Protection and the Courts

DATE & TIME: Monday 23 August 2010, 12:30pm start (Lunch provided from 12.00 noon) finishes 5:30pm.

VENUE: Engineers Australia Auditorium Ground Floor, 8 Thomas Street, Chatswood, NSW, 2067.

ENQUIRIES: Indra Jayewardene (Chair Maritime Panel 2010) HIDDEN EMAIL

Timetable and registration details can be found in the attached PDF. Please note payments can only be processed online.

Australian Engineering Week

Australian Engineering Week is currently scheduled for the first week of August 2010 and Engineers Australia are in the process of getting publicity out and asking for volunteers. If you are interested please see: www.makeitso.org.au for all the details.