ENGINEERING TECH, CONSTRUCTION
Newswire | April 05, 2023
CIMA+, one of Canada's largest privately-owned consulting engineering firms, today announced the acquisition of MidSea Engineering ("MidSea"), a Vancouver-based engineering consulting firm that provides multidisciplinary engineering and consulting services and solutions.
Established by Ali Taleb, P.Eng. in 2019, MidSea specializes in water resources, hydropower, marine infrastructure, and industrial engineering, and boasts a dedicated team of professionals in civil, mechanical, and structural engineering.
"The acquisition of MidSea Engineering accelerates our firm's expansion plan and enhances our presence in Metro Vancouver and Western Canada," stated Kelly Yuzdepski, Regional Executive Vice-President, Western Canada, CIMA+. "Our clients will now have access to a larger, more comprehensive pool of resources."
MidSea is a young and fast-growing company serving a wide range of clients from major utilities and municipalities to private developers and contractors. MidSea's team will join CIMA+ and move into the CIMA+ Vancouver office.
"MidSea's clientele will benefit from the depth of expertise and wide geographic footprint of CIMA+ across British Columbia and Alberta," said Ali Taleb, Founder and Principal at MidSea Engineering. "The CIMA+ corporate culture of prioritizing both staff and clients is compatible with ours, meaning there is a natural fit between our respective teams."
"By joining forces with MidSea, we will further augment the Western Canadian hydropower, water resources, marine and industrial engineering capabilities that we have been continually developing for more than 10 years and also through our recent acquisition of Calgary-based Westhoff Engineering Resources" explained Steeve L'Heureux, Executive Vice-President, Energy and Resources, CIMA+. "MidSea's water resources and mechanical process skillsets will accelerate our municipal infrastructure team's development and drive growth throughout British Columbia and across Western Canada."
"The team from MidSea will add expertise in British Columbia for our Energy and Resources (E&R) sector, while providing support to our infrastructure sector business," added Mr. L'Heureux. "Moreover, MidSea's Dams & Water Resources capabilities will help ensure Dam and Hydropower expertise in the region, our company is well-equipped to tackle any project related to these fields."
About CIMA+
CIMA+ provides a variety of consulting engineering services, namely in the areas of buildings, infrastructure, transportation, energy and resources, project management, communication systems, and the environment. With an ever-growing presence, CIMA+'s team relies on decades of experience acquired across Canada to offer excellence in engineering projects. The search for excellence has been part of our DNA since our foundation in 1990. This commitment has allowed CIMA+ to rank among the largest private consulting engineering firms in Canada. Today, with more than 30 offices across Canada, CIMA+ employs 2,800+ people, over half of whom share ownership in the company.
At CIMA+ we believe that engineering exists to improve the lives of those around us. Sustainable solutions inspired by engineering help meet the many challenges of today and tomorrow. Because when you engineer for people, you also engineer for a better world.
About Midsea Engineering
MidSea Engineering Ltd. is a provider of engineering consulting services specializing in multi-disciplinary technical expertise and management. The team at MidSea has a long tradition of commitment in delivering state-of-the-art projects efficiently with a high-quality standard. MidSea Engineering Ltd. is a group of highly trained and qualified Professional Engineers and Project Managers who are diverse in age, gender, ethnicity, and experience. MidSea has the right team and tools to deliver multidisciplinary projects in the heavy civil and infrastructure industry, where mechanical, civil, structural expertise all work together.
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ENGINEERING TECH, CONSTRUCTION
PR Newswire | June 01, 2023
Aurigo Software, the leading provider of capital planning and construction management software for infrastructure and private owners, is partnering with the University of Florida's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering to develop a revolutionary system for underwater surveying, mapping, and inspection, provisionally named Bathydrone.
The current process to gather data for new underwater construction or the inspection of existing assets such as bridges, docks, and levees consists of manual surveying from divers or survey sensors mounted to a boat. With the new, safer, and more efficient Bathydrone system, a drone drags a small vessel on the water's surface, eliminating the need for manual surveying. The vessel is equipped with a COTS sonar unit mounted on its bottom. The sonar unit has down-scan, side-scan, and chirp capabilities and logs data onboard the console, which is located inside the hull. Data can then be retrieved post-mission from the console and plotted in various ways.
"We are excited to be working on this groundbreaking technology with the team at the University of Florida," said Balaji Sreenivasan, CEO and founder of Aurigo Software. "The Bathydrone system will vastly expand the possibilities for underwater endeavors while providing a cheaper, safer, and more eco-friendly alternative for our customers."
Not only is data collected more easily, but the technology can also be operated remotely and autonomously using AI navigation software to overcome obstacles in or under the water, creating a faster and cheaper solution. The system will also integrate with Aurigo's Masterworks Cloud Platform to properly store and categorize project data and route any inspections or other results for approval or further action.
Additional Bathydrone differentiators include:
Fully battery-operated and better for the environment—no fuel or loud noise
Lightweight and easily transportable
Does not require a dock or boat ramp to get in the water
Able to be deployed in a wide variety of water systems, including shallow water and rivers with strong currents
Able to survey a large area on a single charge
"This project supports our department's mission to conduct state-of-the-art research to advance science and technology," said Peter Ijfu, University of Florida's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Excellence Term Professor and Associate Chair of Faculty Affairs. "This pioneering approach to underwater surveying and mapping has multiple real-world applications that are not currently commercially available."
Aurigo will work closely with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering's staff and students to bring this leading-edge solution to the infrastructure market in the next 12 to 18 months.
About Aurigo Software
Aurigo builds software that helps build the world. Aurigo provides modern, cloud-based solutions for capital infrastructure and private owners to help them plan with confidence, build with quality, and maintain their assets efficiently. With more than $300b of capital programs under management, Aurigo's solutions are trusted by over 300 customers in transportation, water and utilities, healthcare, higher education, and the government on over 40,000 projects across North America. Aurigo helps capital program executives make better decisions based on proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. Aurigo is a privately held US corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas, with global offices in Canada and India. Learn more at www.aurigo.com.
About the University of Florida
The University of Florida is a major, public, comprehensive, land-grant, research university. The state's oldest and most comprehensive university, UF is among the nation's most academically diverse public universities. UF traces its beginnings to a small seminary in 1853. It opened its doors in Gainesville in 1906 with 102 students. Today, it is one of the most comprehensive and academically diverse universities in the nation, with an enrollment of some 52,000 students annually. UF is home to 16 colleges and more than 170 research centers and institutes and UF offers nearly 300 graduate degree programs. Only five other universities nationwide have as many programs of study on one campus as the University of Florida.
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ENGINEERING TECH, CONSTRUCTION
Globenewswire | May 19, 2023
RIB Software launches free-to-use RIB Carbon Quantifier for optimized carbon quantification in construction.
RIB Software, a leading multinational provider of innovative technology solutions to the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries, has partnered with non-profit organization, Building Transparency, to develop the RIB Carbon Quantifier.
Through a direct link with Building Transparency’s Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), the application allows users to quickly, easily and consistently allocate carbon environmental product declaration (EPD) values against their imported estimate data, including resource quantities.
This comes as studies highlight the industry’s impact on the environment, with construction constituting a staggering 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions and accounting for 36% of global energy demands.
René Wolf, Chief Executive Officer at RIB Software, says there is a growing need to reduce carbon emissions within the engineering and construction sector to combat the damaging effects of climate change.
“Until recently, the construction industry’s response to reducing building-related emissions has focused on energy efficiency by reducing operational emissions - the energy used to heat, cool and light buildings.
“While previously effective, this approach overlooks embodied carbon emissions associated with material and construction processes across a building’s lifecycle, which represents a quarter of the carbon emitted during the life of a building and 11% of all global carbon emissions.
“It is therefore critical to increase efforts to quantify, monitor, evaluate and ultimately reduce the embodied carbon emitted throughout the lifecycle of a construction project - and the driving factor for why RIB Software developed the Carbon Quantifier application,” explains Wolf.
Through a seamless integration with Building Transparency’s premier, free-to-use EC3 tool, the RIB Carbon Quantifier application is set to be the first of its kind in the industry to assist the built environment in extracting and quantifying embodied carbon data more quickly and efficiently, optimizing carbon quantification and reducing estimate delivery times.
Through this powerful partnership of technology, industry professionals will now have access to an additional toolset to optimize the efficiency in the quantification and measurement of carbon, thus better facilitating design and procurement decisions, helping the global AEC industry in achieving a lower embodied carbon footprint.
Stacy Smedley, Executive Director of Building Transparency, says reducing embodied carbon emissions is one of the biggest opportunities in the fight against global warming. “Partnerships, like ours with RIB Software, are critical to driving action in the building sector and identifying new solutions that make it easier to prioritize low-carbon decision-making on projects. It’s exciting to have our EC3 data and its large carbon impact database be utilized and leveraged for tools like the RIB Carbon Quantifier.”
The primary features of the RIB Carbon Quantifier include the easy extraction of embodied carbon data from Building Transparency’s EC3 database against estimates; keeping a repository of each estimate’s embodied carbon data for cross-referencing and facilitating easier allocation of carbon values for future projects; the ability to easily export aligned quantified data back to EC3 for analytics, reporting and dashboarding; and providing users with a direct integration with other estimating products within the RIB portfolio of products.
Wolf says the need to accelerate decarbonization practices in the AEC industry is critical, and using an application like the RIB Carbon Quantifier will not only allow users to optimize carbon quantification, but will ensure they avoid unnecessary energy spent and emissions generated from associated projects and processes.
“At RIB, we are driven by transformative digital technologies, industry best-practice and trends that help propel the industry forward and make engineering and construction more efficient and sustainable,” he concludes.
About RIB Software
Driven by disruptive digital technologies and trends, here at RIB we’ve made it our primary purpose to propel the industry forward and make engineering and construction more efficient and sustainable.
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