engineering header graphic

What is Civil Engineering?


By

Civil engineering is a very broad field of engineering that itself is broken up into several different smaller categories. For the most part though, civil engineering deals with planning, construction and maintenance of public works or structures as they relate to water, earth or civilization.

Today most civil engineering has to do with bridges, power plants, roads, trains, water supply, structures, the environment flood control

Article continued below...

Need Help with DIACAP? Choose the DIACAP experts! - Sponsored Link
Ad - www.lunarline.com Jul 3 2008 8:35PM GMT
Komatsu Seen Posting Record Op Profit For April-June Quarter
Nikkei Net Interactive Jul 3 2008 8:35PM GMT
National Federation of the Blind Nonvisual Accessibility Web Certification Granted to GE
IT Business Net Jul 3 2008 8:34PM GMT
GE gives negative equity perspective
Your Mortgage Jul 3 2008 8:32PM GMT
Cummins takes $100M damage hit to research center
Business Week Jul 3 2008 8:21PM GMT


and traffic. One way of looking at civil engineering is that it is a profession highly concerned with making the world a more comfortable place in which to live.

Civil engineering is sometimes utilized or seen as a way to track and judge how manmade constructs and devices have affected natural constructs and environments. In older times, engineering was considered to be comprised of only two major subsets, those of military and civil engineering. Even though there are many subclasses of engineering today, civil engineering is still a very large umbrella for unclassified subfields of engineering.

General civil engineers work intimately with specialized civil engineers as well as surveyors and other specialists to construct and serve fixed size projects where they will consider the given factors of community, project site and public interest and requirements. General civil engineers spend a great deal of time traveling to and from the work site and revising and explaining designs for the current project.

Civil engineering is broken into several main subcategories, including structural engineering, fire protection engineering, geotechnical engineering, transportation engineering, environmental engineering, hydraulic engineering, construction engineering and water resources engineering.

A common misconception about civil engineering is that civil engineering work is completely unrelated to computer science and mathematics, when in reality much of what we know of as computer science was co-created by civil engineering, in which network structural analysis issues required parallel computing and development of algorithms.


Here are some more engineering articles...

What is Civil Engineering?


By
Civil engineering is a very broad field of engineering that itself is broken up into several different smaller categories. For the most part though, civil engineering deals with planning, Read more...

A Brief History of Early Electrical Engineering


By
The field of electrical engineering first became a recognizable occupation around the end of the 1800s. This was during the time of early commercialization of the electric telegraph as well as Read more...

A Brief History of Early Electrical Engineering


By
The field of electrical engineering first became a recognizable occupation around the end of the 1800s. This was during the time of early commercialization of the electric telegraph as well as Read more...

The Software Engineering: Ongoing Debate About the Term ‘Engineering’


By
In 2004 there were more than 760,000 software engineers employed in the United States. To put this in perspective there were about 1.4 million engineers (combining all engineering disciplines) Read more...