Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Building Runways with Durable Computers

By Allyson Westcot


The construction industry is one in which rugged technology can give various benefits. Almost every piece of equipment used during construction must be rugged. Construction sites are dirty, dusty and full of vibration. A fragile laptop computer would suffer problems fast in this type of environment.

That's why the firms in control of building Runway D, the fourth runway at Tokyo International Airport, used Panasonic rugged computers to help contractors define the thickness of the soil underneath their equipment.

A roller that vibrates heavily is used to help determine the soil thickness. A regular laptop employed in this equipment would have had to resist that repeated, hard vibration. Durable computers are meant to handle this, while a regular laptop computer is not. The vibration would most likely have ruined the hard drives in ordinary computers in almost no time at all. But the sturdy computers from Panasonic that were mounted in the cabs of these rollers were used to record the information gleaned from the hardware.

These rollers can basically make a G-force fo up to 8 from the vibrations, a condition that would kill a standard portable. But thanks to the Toughbooks, the QC checks could actually be done with technology instead of by hand, shortening the method and lightening the workload for the individuals involved. They were also used in survey cars which helped take other measurements.

Thanks to rugged technology, many more of the jobs in construction, like the examples from the runway, can be done with computers. That makes the work more efficient and more correct, which not only saves time but money. More gets done in a shorter period of time, and that may cut the required budget instantly. Because the info gleaned from technology rather than from manual things like surveys is in general more correct, that cuts costs of redoing things or fixing mistakes later. Not only is that cheaper, it's safer.




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