The Biggest Engineering Project For 2012

      The biggest stories in engineering research in 2012 were probably not the biggest actual projects completed last year.

The Curiosity, a rover smaller than the average pick-up truck as Ford helpfully pointed out, made front page news around the world not only for successfully pulling off an exhilarating stunt of landing aerobatics, but for actually getting people engaged in space exploration a way they haven't in years.

Back on Earth, researchers seem to have resolved a 50-year-long quest to understand a fundamental facet of matter with the discovery of the Higgs boson, somewhat dramatically called the "God particle."

But as much as these smaller-scale achievements have had a big impact on science, that's not to say there weren't some impressively massive engineering innovations in 2012, one of which has been nearly two decades in the making.

Three Gorges Dam

It's hard to find a civil engineering project that can engender so many mixed emotions than the Three Gorges Dam, the enormous power station blocking up the Yangtze River in the central Chinese province of Hubei. Beginning construction at the end of 1994, the dam first started operation in 2008, but only added the last of its unprecedented 32 turbines last summer.

The Three Gorges Dam is certainly an awe-inspiring physical structure, stretching more than 7,600 feet across the Yangtze and standing nearly 600 feet tall. But the project is even more impressive as a power plant, where those 32 turbines combine to give the dam a generation capacity of 22.5 gigawatts, more than any other power plant in the world. In addition to providing desperately needed power for the quickly growing Chinese economy, the dam also provides the benefit of preventing the massive seasonal floods that would regularly devastate lands downstream.

Nonetheless, not many new engineering applications are likely to prove as controversial as the Three Gorges Dam. The creation of the enormous, 370 mile-long reservoir uprooted more than 1.3 million people, emptying entire cities, and also destroyed numerous historical sites.

London Olympics

Like every Olympic Games, London won it's bid in part based on the spectacular buildings promised for the event. In the case of the London, the promises were a bit less ambitious than the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but they were nonetheless impressive buildings put together in relatively short order.

Probably the most distinctive of the new structures would be the Aquatics Centre, lovingly dubbed the Stingray for its upswept arms and tail. The facility holds three Olympic-length pools along with up to 17,500 people.

In addition to the Aquatics Centre, many fans were impressed with the new Olympic Stadium, a round open-air stadium that was able to hold as many as 80,000 people during the games. But that is not necessarily the interesting part.

With so much concern about Olympics structures that ultimately go to waste, the London stadium was built with an intentionally light, airy design, using almost one-fourth as much steel as the stadium in China, and an entire tier was able to be removed to bring the capacity down to only 25,000 after the games were finished.

T30Â Hotel

If the buildings of the Olympics are always a bit rushed compared to similar projects, there is one hotel in China that puts these efforts to shame.

The T30 is a 30-story-tall hotel in Hunan province constructed by Broad Sustainable Building, a Chinese prefabricated construction company. While the building itself is a five-star hotel, the fascinating part about the project is that the entire on-site construction process took only 360 hours from start to finish.

A growing trend in construction, prefabrication allowed the company to do the vast majority of fabrication at an off-site factory, simply transporting units to the site and attaching them as directed. Broad Group vice president JulietJiang wrote for Bloomberg that this new approach to buildings, while impressive because of its speed, is first and foremost an environmentally-friendly process.

According to Jiang, prefabricated construction cuts down on waste by a staggering 99 percent, and the lower costs allow the company to use higher-quality materials for insulation and other systems, dramatically cutting down on energy demands.

Andasol Solar Plant

Technically, the Andasol power station was completed just at the end of 2011, but the importance of this massive project in the emerging field of renewable energy merits some mention, if only for the sheer scale of the project.

Unlike many projects in the U.S., Andasol uses solar thermal technology rather than photovoltaics, which have come to dominate the field. The plant features 600,000 mirrors spread across 126 acres of land near Granada in southern Spain. Together, these mirrors can produce as much as 150 megawatts of electricity, making it the largest solar plant in the world.

Combined with a molten salt energy storage system, the power plant can more easily smooth out variations in production or even generate power even after the sun has set.