Civil and Environmental Engineering facilities

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UNSW has general facilities covering the following applications:

  • Engineering construction and management
  • Geotechnical engineering
  • Material engineering
  • Structural engineering
  • Transport engineering, road and pavement design
  • Water engineering
  • Centre for Water and Waste Technology
  • Water Research Laboratory
  • Mobile equipment for on-site studies of noise and vibration and monitoring construction operations is also available.

There are also a number of specific Surveying and Geospatial Engineering facilities within the Satellite Navigation and Positioning (SNAP) Lab:       

  • State-of-the-art computing facilities (PCs, workstations, printers, digitisers, scanners), essential to this IT-intensive discipline
  • A wide variety of GPS equipment (more than 20 each of dual-frequency and single-frequency receivers)
  • Spirent GSS6560 GPS RF signal simulator with INS upgrade
  • Two GPS software receivers: the DataFusion Matlab receiver, and the NordNav R30
  • Several Altera FPGA development systems
  • Several GPS Software Development Kits, inertial navigation sensors, pseudolites, wireless comms and UHF radio equipment, and a range of ancillary equipment to support research into GPS and other wireless location technologies
  • A range of GPS software systems (many developed in-house) as well as the GAMIT and Bernese software packages
  • Software for SAR and InSAR data processing (some developed in-house) as well as the APP and EV InSAR (Atlantis, Canada), PulSAR (Phoenix Systems, UK), ROI-PAC (JPL, USA) and DORIS (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
  • Software packages to aid teaching and research for field-to-finish surveying systems: GEOCOMP, and CIVILCAD
  • Other software support such as MATLAB, SKI, and others

In addition, the GIS Laboratory is equipped with the full suite of ESRI ArcGIS software:

  • The Image Analysis Laboratory includes two sophisticated LH Systems Digital Photogrammetric Workstations, two Adam MPS-2 analytical plotters, and a Rollei 6006 semi-metric camera with reseau for close-range photogrammetric applications
  • The Store contains a wide range of field portable equipment: a large number of electronic tacheometers, theodolites, levels (laser and digital), a Cyrax 2400 Laser Scanner, a reflectorless total station, and high-precision industrial measurement equipment and accessories (eg electronic barometers and temperature/humidity probes)
  • The facilities of the Centre for Remote Sensing & GIS, jointly administered by the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, are also available to researchers. The CRSGIS has a range of GIS and remote sensing/image analysis software, including ENVI, ArcGIS, GENAMAP, ERDAS, and others

You can find out more on the School’s website. You can also call Associate Professor Steve Foster, Postgraduate Research Coordinator, on +61 2 9385 5055 or send him an email

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