by: Christian Barrett
Civil 3D Guide to Sustainable Designing
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ne of the fastest growing markets for the civil engineering industry is sustainable design. There has been an increase in this market even during the recent economic downturn. Sustainable design is a practice that I feel very strongly about; in my mind, green is always better. It is better for the environment. It is better for the inhabitants of such developments and better for the developers and owners. It can also have a higher value than traditional designs. There are many levels of sustainable design, from minor changes in how we develop or redevelop, to certified sustainability designs such as a Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED®) project that is certified by the U.S. Green Building Council and other programs as well. Some of these programs are regional, and a quick Internet search could reveal other options available to you or you can have your designs certified. Bear in mind, however, that your designs do not have to be certified to make them sustainable designs. It’s all in how we decide to design our projects, but the certifications certainly do help and make it easier to judge just how sustainable our designs are. We have also been designing some forms of sustainability our entire careers. A perfect example of this is a detention or retention pond and many other design practices that we might not even recognize as sustainable practices. Of course, some of these design practices are forced on us due to regulations that we must follow in order to get our designs approved. But they are sustainable practices nonetheless. The software we use can play an important role in our designs, not only in the design itself, but in the evaluation of sites and the surrounding area. When working on a sustainable design we have to consider more than just our lot and surrounding lots. We have to look at a much bigger picture. We have to consider many factors other than cost and a client’s desire. In many traditional design situations, owners would buy a piece of property and then come to an engineer with their intent for this property. March 2011
AutoCAD
Civil 3D 2011
This method does not work as well in a sustainable design process. The engineer has to get involved sooner in the development process if a sustainable design is the intent of the owner, especially if he or she would like the development to be certified. As I have stated, there is much more to developing sustainably than just the property we are developing. With that being said, any development can be a sustainable development, or at least more sustainable than traditional developments. Even small changes can have a large impact overall. One day in the near future we will no longer refer to sustainable designs as sustainable. They will simply be “designs” once more, as this type of development becomes the norm. For the rest of this article I will refer to sustainable designs simply as “designs.”
AERIAL IMAGERY One very useful tool in designing is the use of aerial imagery. Images can come from many sources and in many formats, so I cannot get too in-depth in this short article. Of all of the data we work with, imagery is by far the one item that will use up our computers resources and make for a very bad day. Therefore, we have to be careful about the data we use in our drawings. AutoCAD® Civil 3D® gives a somewhat better result when working with images obtained by way of the Feature Data Objects (FDO) data access technology. FDO can use coordinate systems to place our imagery in the correct location based off of the Earth’s surface, or translate from one coordinate system to another. If you have never tried this option, I recommend that you test it out. You can also use Google Earth, which contains free data that we can pull into our drawings, and is not limited to only imagery. In many locations you can also pull in surface data. Keep in mind this is not survey-quality surface data, but it can be very useful in a preliminary stage of design and site evaluation.
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