Civil engineering links#
Institution of civil engineers if you’re a member (any grade of member, student or graduate inclusive) you should check out their digital libraries and actual library (they send books in the post).
Open library part of the Internet Archive. You can legally digitally borrow anything in their extensive scanned book library. For me the highlights are things like “Open channel hydraulics” by Ven te Chow, too old to be in most digital libraries but a classic text book.
David Apsley’s Hydraulics lecture notes fantastic set of lecture notes. Really good for brushing up on the basics and gets pretty advanced too. Lots of worked examples. This website got me thinking about creating my own website.
H R Wallingford produce quite a lot of freely available publications of high quality. “Air problems in pipelines” is the one I refer to most often but there are lots of others.
WIS & IGN library essential guidance for people working in the water sector. The Code formerly known as “Sewers for adoption”. Used to cost money but now in the public domain. If you’re building sewers or surface drainage for water companies in the UK you need this.
online tools#
Web plot digitizer if you manually read numbers off engineering graphs regularly you should check this out. It’s a great tool for digitising graphs. Once you’ve done that you can check out ZunZun3 which will hunt hundreds of curves fitting algorithms to find good curve fits for your data. Or you can use various interpolation options from Numpy or Scipy etc if you’re a Pythonista.
Equation editor create nicely rendered maths equations. Fastest if you know LaTeX maths syntax (if you don’t know how to write maths in LaTeX syntax you can find hundreds of websites easily) but has a GUI if you don’t.
Grid reference finder a really handy website for coordinate transformations, post codes, getting rough elevation profiles for a route and other GIS related minor tasks.
US government#
HEC RAS EPA NET I’ve not personally used either of these pieces of software but it’s impressive what the US government has produced and then just made available for free. The documentation is useful too. The theory is explained well. Hydraulic design of energy dissipators for culverts and channels really pleased to find this one. I’d been looking for a way to find the head-loss in a hydraulic jump for channels of arbitrary cross section shape and got it from chapter 6 of this publication. USBR been a while since I looked through this but lots of old papers on all sorts of things.
Building#
Paving expert more on here than the name suggests. Full of practical know how. Quite a bit about drainage and roads too.