Portal:Infrastructure

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Infrastructure Portal

Welcome to Wikipedia's infrastructure portal, your gateway to the subject of infrastructure
and its monumental importance for everyday society and the economy.

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Infrastructure Portal

State Street Bridge on the Chicago River in Chicago, Illinois.

Infrastructure generally refers to the basic physical structures and facilities, often government-owned, needed for the effective operation of a society or economy. They include the critical assets that are essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions. More specifically, infrastructure facilitates the production of goods and services, the distribution of finished products to markets, and provision of basic social services such as schools and hospitals. Public works and public capital are common terms for government-owned infrastructure. Examples of such infrastructure assets and facilities include the following:

transportation systems (highways, airports, railways, ports, inland shipping);
electricity generation, transmission and distribution;
water supply (drinking water, wastewater, sewage);
water structures (bridges, dams, levees, canals);
gas and oil production, transport and distribution;
home heating including natural gas, fuel oil, propane;
telecommunication, satellite, and broadband;
waste management (solid waste, hazardous waste, landfill);
agriculture, food production and distribution;
public buildings and services including public health, hospitals, schools, libraries;
local services (police, fire protection);
recreation facilities including museums, parks, beaches, civic centers;

Selected article

Combined Sewer System. During dry weather (and small storms), all flows are handled by the publicly owned treatment works (POTW). During large storms, the relief structure allows some of the combined stormwater and sewage to be discharged untreated to an adjacent water body.

A combined sewer is a type of sewer system that collects sanitary sewage and stormwater runoff in a single pipe system. Combined sewers can cause serious water pollution problems due to combined sewer overflows, which are caused by large variations in flow between dry and wet weather. This type of sewer design is no longer used in building new communities, but many older cities continue to operate combined sewers. Many cities that installed sewage collection systems in the early 20th century, or earlier, used single-pipe systems that collect both sewage and urban runoff from streets and roofs. This type of collection system is referred to as a combined sewer system or a CSS. The cities' rationale when these systems were built was that it would be cheaper to build just a single system. Most cities at that time did not have sewage treatment plants, so there was no perceived public health advantage in constructing a separate storm sewer system. Combined sewer systems are found throughout the United States, but are most heavily concentrated in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions. State and local authorities have generally not allowed the construction of new CSSs since the first half of the 20th century.

A combined sewer overflow, or CSO, is the discharge of wastewater and stormwater from a combined sewer system directly into a river, stream, lake or ocean. Overflow frequency and duration varies both from system to system, and from outfall to outfall, within a single combined sewer system. Some CSO outfalls discharge infrequently, while others activate every time it rains. During heavy rainfall when the stormwater exceeds the sanitary flow, the CSO is diluted. The storm water component contributes a significant amount of pollutants to CSO. Each storm is different in the quantity and type of pollutants it contributes. For example, storms that occur in late summer, when it has not rained for a while, have the most pollutants. Pollutants like oil, grease, fecal coliform from pet and wildlife waste, and pesticides get flushed into the sewer system. In cold weather areas, pollutants from cars, people and animals also accumulate on hard surfaces and grass during the winter and then are flushed into the sewer systems during heavy spring rains. Read more...

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Selected picture

The Jindo Bridge in South Korea

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Diagrams

Graphical phases in the life cycle of a facility

Public Vs. Private Provision

Infrastructure Systems

Cash Flow

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Selected biography

Edwin Howard Armstrong (December 18, 1890 – January 31, 1954) was an American electrical engineer and inventor who invented the modern frequency modulation (FM) radio. Born in New York City, New York, in 1890, he later studied at Columbia University and later became a professor there. He invented the regenerative circuit while he was an undergraduate and patented it in 1914, the super-regenerative circuit (patented 1922), and the superheterodyne receiver (patented 1918).

Armstrong contributed the most to modern electronics technology. His discoveries revolutionized electronic communications. Regeneration, or amplification via positive feedback is still in use to this day. Also, Armstrong discovered that Lee De Forest's Audion would go into oscillation when feedback was increased. Thus, the Audion could not only detect and amplify radio signals, it could transmit them as well. His research and experimentation with the Audion moved radio reception beyond the crystal set and spark-gap transmitters. Radio signals could be amplified via regeneration to the point of human hearing without a headset. Armstrong later published a paper detailing how the Audion worked. Armstrong's discovery and development of superheterodyne technology made radio receivers, then the primary communications devices of the time, more sensitive and selective. Before heterodyning, radio signals often overrode and interfered with each other. Heterodyning also made radio receivers much easier to use, rendering obsolete the multitude of tuning controls on radio sets of the time. The superheterodyne technology is still used today. Possibly his best known discovery was the wide-band frequency modulation. FM was born of a request by David Sarnoff of RCA as a means to eliminate static in radio reception.

Armstrong was of the opinion that anyone who had actual contact with the development of radio understood that the radio art was the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae (known today as part of "mathematical physics"). His work, as important as it was in its own right, was a part of a continuum of progress in communications and electronics that since his time has brought forward color television, the personal computer, the Internet, cable and satellite radio and TV, personal mobile phones, audio, [[video] and computing, digital stereo radio on both the medium wave and VHF-FM bands, and digital high definition television on VHF, UHF, cable and satellite. Armstrong's FM system was used for communications between NASA and the Apollo program astronauts. Read more...

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WikiProjects

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Innovative Methods

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Marvels

Akashi Kaikyō Bridge - Japanese bridge, longest central span of any suspension bridge
Ashkelon seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) plant - Israel water facility, largest desalination plant in world
Autobahn - Germany highway system, first of its kind
Beijing–Shanghai High-Speed Railway - Chinese newly erected high speed line, longest in the world
Brooklyn Bridge - U.S. bridge connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn, first steel-wire suspension bridge
Channel Tunnel - Underground rail tunnel connecting England and France
Curitiba Bus Rapid System - Brazil bus rapid transit system
Delta Works - Netherlands intricate water system of 13 dams, including dams, sluices, locks, dikes, levees, and storm surge barriers
Hoover Dam - U.S. concrete arch-gravity dam
Interstate Highway System - U.S. highway system, largest in the world
London sewerage system - England sewerage system with large pumping stations and water drains
North American Electric Grid - U.S. and Canada electrical grid, over 300,000 miles long
Panama Canal - Man-made ship canal connecting Atlantic and Pacific Oceans
Thanet Wind Farm - England off-shore wind farm, largest in the world with 100 turbines
Three Gorges Dam - Chinese dam, largest in the world
Transcontinental Railroad - U.S. national railway connecting Atlantic and Pacific coasts

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Related portals

Aviation	Bridges	Business and Economics

Cars	Energy	Engineering

Nautical	Roads	Technology

Trains	Transport	Water

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Did you know

... the National Highway Authority of India has an ambitious plan underway to upgrade, widen, and expand their highway network to over 80,000 km by 2022, making it the longest in the world?
...the water and sanitation companies in Chile are privately-owned and operated with investment commitments reaching $5.7 USD billion from 1993-2005 through 20 projects?
... that Germany has decided to close all its nuclear power plants by 2022?
... that South Korea developed a successful technology transfer of high speed rail technology with French engineers?
... U.S. President Abraham Lincoln who pushed for the Transcontinental Railroad amidst the Civil War was a former railroad lawyer?
... that Hong Kong maintains private bus services that are publicly traded franchises?
... the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario carries over 25% of merchandise trade ($13 billion in annual production) between Canada and the U.S.?
... that the South East Queensland Water Grid, a 535 km network of potable bulk water, in Australia is considered one of the most successful water infrastructure projects in the world?
... the longest high voltage direct current is currently under construction in Brazil, connecting the Amazonas to the São Paulo area, at a length of 2,500 km (1,600 mi)?