Santander infrastructure fund cancelled

Santander has canceled the Infrastructure Fund II. The idea behind the infrastructure fund was very similar to the disastrous real estate funds: to make a benefit from participating in expanding roads, ports, water systems, etc...

Fundraising for Santander Infrastructure Fund II was being wound down by its placement agent, Atlantic Pacific Capital, after reaching just less than half of its 1.5 billion euro target, people familiar with the fundraising have said. Although infrastructure assets often benefit from government support that makes them attractive, funds that choose assets exposed to market risk - such as toll roads that rely on car traffic - are viewed more sceptically in an economic downturn.

Santander together with Spanish infrastructure group Abertis, bought stakes in two Chilean toll roads from Spanish builder ACS in December 2008 in a 728 million euro deal. Also, Santander Infrastructure Fund II bought Chilean water company Aguas Nuevas from the Solari Group.

Wind & water power, a perfect match

With great gorges and high wind energy potential, the Canary Islands (Spain) prove to be a very suitable place for the implementation of a hydroeolic power station. It is also the first wind & water power station that will be providing close to 80% of the total electricity demand of an isolated island.

The key advantage of such a mixture is that the system overcomes the characteristic problems of variability, discontinuity and unpredictability of winds. When the energy produced by the wind farm exceeds the demand, the surplus is used to pump desalinated water in a reservoir situated 700 m above sea level. Conversely, if the energy produced by the wind farm is insufficient to meet the demand, the water stored in the upper reservoir is released through the turbines to a lower reservoir, converting the potential energy of the water into electrical energy. In this way, thanks to the potential energy storage and the controllable power output of the turbines, it is possible to establish a steady voltage that matches the demand at any time. It is the worthwhile to notice that the weather pattern does not usually hit wind and water simultaneously.

All these ecologic reasons together with the record time to deliver the final project made me feel quite proud of this work in the end. I enclose some pics of the pumping building (8777 m2) and turbining station (1344 m2) that were calculated on my own. Very heavy machinery, wind pressure, earthquake and a difficult volcanic geology have been the main conditionants of design.

General scheme of the complex

Pumping building - Floor plan

Pumping building - Office block - Model of the structure in Cypecad
Pumping building -Pump station - Model of the structure in SAP2000

Turbining station - Floor plan

Turbining station - Model of the structure in Cypecad

Engineering commercial frameworks

One of the keys to understand the main differences between the British and Spanish civil engineering markets is to compare the award procedures of public works:

I – Separate design award and execution award.
Spain 75%
UK 10%
EU 60%

II – Joint design and execution award.
UK 70%
Spain 12% (nearly all for concessions of highways and airports).
EU 35%

III – Negotiated procedure and direct award.
UK 20%
Spain 13%
EU 5%

All these numbers were obtained, aggregated and rounded from the vast work of Daniel Raccah at the University of Rome La Sapienza.

Integrated contract – or Design & Build – is the formula that has recently seen the greatest rise in the United Kingdom and other northern countries, where it is now decidedly the most prevalent form of award. On the other hand, the traditional formula of prior award of the design (meaning the design adjusted to the tendering of the work) separate from its execution is still the method most utilised in Spain. But something is changing: in recent years I have seen that the direction of civil works, the technical assistance and the project management are usually joint-awarded to the same consultant company. Based on my own experience, between 30% and 50% of the fees go for the project and 50% to 70% go for the direction of works.

Finally, it must be said that the Spanish engineering consultancy market is highly competitive and provides a favourable investment climate for foreign groups. In fact, some engineering companies from the U.K. (Arup), France (Eyser) and U.S. (CH2M Hill, Fluor Daniel, Foster Wheeler and URS) are present in the Spanish market with great success.

Related: A brief history of engineering consultancy.

The skew (or non-orthogonal) reinforcement problem

Reinforcement that is not perperdicular or that is arranged in more than two directions occurs frequently in the design of slabs for skew bridges. In such cases, reinforcement can be calculated with an equivalent orthogonal reinforcement.


Given n arbitrarily oriented groups of paralel bars r1, r2, ...., rn, an equivalent reinforcement (ru, rv, ruv) for an auxiliar set UV of perpendicular axes are obtained by projection:

ru = r1*(cos(a1))^2 + ... + rn*(cos(an))^2
rv = r1*(sin(a1))^2 + ... + rn*(sin(an))^2
ruv = r1*cos(a1)sin(a1) + ... + rn*cos(an)sin(an)

These values are transformed into the principal directions of reinforcement XY (that are obviously orthogonal) like this:

rx = ru*(cos(b))^2+rv*(sin(b))^2+ruv*sin(2*b)
ry = rv*(sin(b))^2+rv*(cos(b))^2-ruv*sin(2*b)

where

b= 0.5*arctan(2*ruv/(ru-rv))

Now, the axial and flexural resistance should be confronted with the forces and moments given in the XY system of coordinates. Changing the local axis of the shell elements we obtain Nx, Ny, Nxy and Mx, My, Mxy.


The Wood and Armer rule (or any other similar) can be applied now.

rx should resist Nx' and Mx'
ry should resist Ny' and My'

For a symmetric ultimate reinforcement with Nxy and Mxy not extremely large, Wood and Armer rule becomes.

Nx' = Nx +/- |Nxy|
Ny' = Ny +/- |Nxy|
Mx' = Mx + sign(Mx)*|Mxy|
My' = My + sign(My)*|Mxy|

IT revolution, creativity and recession

Let's not pretend that things will change if we keep doing the same things (...)

Creativity is born from anguish (...)
It's in crisis that inventive is born (...)

Einstein's quotes on crisis.

The global recession is hitting almost everyone. Few months ago Sky News reported that there were nearly 15,000 job losses from June 2008 to December 2008 in the UK civil engineering sector. What is more, not only are the low-tech manufacturing jobs being shifted overseas but the high-tech jobs like mine as well.

Are there some remedies to overcome the crisis? All of us should understand that austerity and belt tightening alone will not solve most of our problems. Any integral solution passes through encouraging an optimistic creativity.

Given that Information Technologies (IT) are having a lot of relevant effects on the way of thinking of a generation of digital born graduates, I have always felt that companies should take advantage of their freshness. Generaly speaking, the mid age managers I met tend to see IT as a mere time and cost reducer forgetting that the main competitive advantage is other: with the computer we can go into our creative juices, explore our wildest imaginations, create the most fabulous designs, solve complex challenging problems and drive inexpensive innovation. Knowledge is transferred from the digital model to the real world and all kind of good and stupid solutions are tested virtually with no harm. Obviously, IT tools cannot totally substitute experience-gained human intuition but natural creativity and learning from mistakes can be boosted thanks to simulation and computer modelling.