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Case study:
Multi-disciplinary Civil Engineering design (quarry)

Description

The multi-disciplinary quarry project aims to bring together 4th-year MEng students from the Structural, Maritime & Environmental courses to enable students from different engineering disciplines to work together as a team on a topic of which they had no prior experience.

Students were given a design brief that was based upon a real limestone outcrop located on the coast of North Wales. They were required to carry out a feasibility study for a fictitious quarry near the coastal town of Rhos-on-Sea. They were expected to formulate their own questions and to seek out solutions. Field visits were arranged to real quarries adjacent to the project site as well as a visit to the fictitious quarry site itself. These were intentionally delayed to avoid students seeing the solutions adopted as being the only possible solutions.

Delivery of much of the input material was web based, as was the results of two site visits to real quarries in the vicinity of Rhos-on-Sea. Maps of the study area were made available to students on a local intranet. These can be seen in the Coursework Briefing Sheet. Students had access to OS map details and geological map details scanned onto the website. In addition some Digimap tiles were made available.

Fig. 1 A view of the existing landscape using Surfer.

The teams made use of a surface mapping/processing software package, Surfer. Contour data extracted from Digimap were used to build a 3D image of the existing ground profile using Surfer. Surfer was also used to provide a section through the ground and to calculate the quarried stone volume. Geological data from RGS maps were used to determine the possible extent of quarry extraction. A 3D visualisation of the final land profile after full extraction was also built using Surfer. Students assessed the transport of extracted aggregate around the site, and also off-site via marine and road transport. A coordinated study of structural, environmental and marine aspects of the project were brought together to produce a final feasibility report.

The input levels to Surfer were extracted manually. Students drew a regular grid over the Digimap tile and read off contour heights at each node. This was a clumsy way of obtaining the data from Digimap. For future exercises a digital way of obtaining ground height information will be tried.

Last updated: June 24, 2003