Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

What Is An Effective Way To Measure Arterial Demand When It Exceeds Capacity?, Mecit Cetin, Hong Yang, Kun Xie, Giridhar Kattepogu, Behrouz Salahshour

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

This project focused on developing and evaluating methods for estimating demand volume for oversaturated corridors. Measuring demand directly with vehicle sensors is not possible when demand is larger than capacity for an extended period, as the queue grows beyond the sensor, and the flow measurements at a given point cannot exceed the capacity of the section. The main objective of the study was to identify and develop methods that could be implemented in practice based on readily available data. To this end, two methods were proposed: an innovative method based on shockwave theory; and the volume delay function adapted from …

Sustainability In Commercial Office Buildings, Jack Cullen

Construction Management

Sustainability in the construction of commercial structures has been expanding through the recent years, largely in part due to the increasing ambitions to maintain a green and healthy planet. Regulations for including sustainable features in new or renovated commercial buildings have been growing throughout the country. In fact, many prospective buyers and lessees are even adding sustainable features to the list of what they look for in a potential place to buy or rent. This report will explore whether or not a building’s sustainable aspects appeal to buyers and lessees of commercial buildings, and if these sustainable aspects contribute to …

City Of Guadalupe Cultural Arts & Education Center Veterans Memorial Wall, Alejandra Arroyo Perez

Construction Management

As a student in Construction Management, the importance of firsthand experience in the construction industry should not be taken lightly. The responsibility of every construction manager is to learn how to take a project from concept to reality. The primary five elements of construction management entail project programming, design development, material specifications, estimating, and scheduling. This paper documents the construction management process related to a Veterans Memorial Wall. Through coordination with the project stakeholders (i.e. property owners, engineer consultants, material fabricators, and vendors) a fully immersive construction management experience is gained. One of the stakeholder requirements was to establish a …

Detecting And Evaluating Cracks On Aging Concrete Members With Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, Brendan Barnes

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Cracks in concrete structures are evaluated through a timely and subjective manual inspection. The location of cracks is often recorded in an inspection report where some cracks are measured. Although measurements or locations may not be necessary for all cracks observed in concrete members, if quantitative data can be gathered in an autonomous way, allowing measurement data to be used in tracking changes in spatial and temporal scales, this quantitative data can provide useful information not yet captured in the manual inspection process. This thesis aims to construct an image-based crack detection and evaluation pipeline that can assist health monitoring …

Application Of Biochar As Beneficial Additive In Concrete, Temirlan Barissov

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Biochar is a high-carbon solid material produced via thermal decomposition of organic biomass in a low-oxygen environment. Characterized with high water retention properties and high alkalinity, biochar is generally used for soil amendment and fertilization purposes. This study is intended to explore the feasibility of using biochar as a beneficial additive of the most used manmade material, concrete. Literature review revealed several studies where biochar was successfully implemented as an additive in concrete. The beneficial influence of biochar on the mechanical characteristics of concrete is based on nucleation and densification effects. However, the internal microstructure, porosity and chemical composition of …

Modeling Watershed Sensitivity To Climate Change In Systems Affected By Discharge Of Mine Tailings, Johnette C. Shockley

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

For more than a century, a large volume of gold-mining tailings was deposited in Whitewood Creek and the Belle Fourche River, tributaries to the Cheyenne River in western South Dakota. Much of it still remains, and field and historical evidence indicates continued remobilization of tailings-containing alluvium in these bedrock-dominated channels. Both long-term, natural fluctuations in climate and anthropogenically driven changes can impact regional precipitation, temperature, hydrologic patterns, and ecosystem functions. Such changes have the potential to affect both the transport and distribution of arsenic-laden sediments and mechanical erosion that can undermine the stability of channel-bed and overbank material.

This study …

Building And Infrastructure Defect Detection And Visualization Using Drone And Deep Learning Technologies, Yuhan Jiang, Sisi Han, Yong Bai

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

This paper presents an accurate and stable method for object and defect detection and visualization on building and infrastructural facilities. This method uses drones and cameras to collect three- dimensional (3D) point clouds via photogrammetry, and uses orthographic or arbitrary views of the target objects to generate the feature images of points’ spectral, elevation, and normal features. U-Net is implemented in the pixelwise segmentation for object and defect detection using multiple feature images. This method was validated on four applications, including on-site path detection, pavement cracking detection, highway slope detection, and building facade window detection. The comparative experimental results confirmed …

Corn Fiber As A Biomass Feedstock For Production Of Succinic Acid, Lisbeth Vallecilla-Yepez, Divya Ramchandran, Dianna Long, Rajib Saha, Mark R. Wilkins

Biological Systems Engineering: Papers and Publications

The selection of an economical carbon source is a fundamental parameter to establish a successful industrial succinic acid (SA) bioprocess. In this work, corn fiber (CF), a renewable and an inexpensive source of carbohydrates, was successfully used for bioproduction of SA. Optimized liquid hot water (LHW) pretreatment followed by enzymatic hydrolysis were used to obtain corn fiber hydrolysate (CFH). Results in batch fermentation with Actinobacillus succinogenes showed that a control solution mimicking CFH produced 28.7 g/L of SA with a yield of 0.67 g SA/g sugars, while fermentation of CFH produced 27.8 g/L of SA with a yield of 0.61 …

Relating The Dongre Workability Test To Cold In-Place Recycled Asphalt Pavements, Gus Williams

Civil Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Dongre Workability Test (DWT) is a test for determining an asphalt pavement’s relative workability from the stress-strain curve of a sample. While the DWT has seen favorable results with warm mix and hot mix asphalt, Casillas and Braham (2020) attempted to apply this test to cold in-place recycled (CIR) asphalt pavements with limited results. This paper looked at the process of reexamining the DWT method to more favorable results with CIR samples. Phase 1 consisted of defining ten possible metrics from the stress-strain curve and applying them to samples with three different curing conditions. From these preliminary results, the …

Connected And Automated Vehicles: Their Implication On Capacity Of A Basic Freeway Section And Impacts On Walkway Safety, Sia Macmillan Lyimo

Dissertations

Autonomous vehicles have recently gained the attention of researchers due to their expected potential benefits on highway traffic streams, such as improving roadway capacity, among others. It is imperative to investigate how these expected benefits can be leveraged in the transportation sector. Understanding the safety and operational benefits helps the concerned transportation agencies and other key stakeholders to make necessary infrastructural and policy adjustments to accommodate such future traffic operation changes. The main goal of this dissertation is to study the impact of connected and automated vehicles on freeway capacity. The simulated environment was created to emulate autonomous vehicle behaviors, …

Resiliency Of Utah's Road Network: A Logit-Based Approach, Max Evan Barnes

Theses and Dissertations

The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) manages and maintains a complex state-wide network of highways. Recent incidents such as the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Min- neapolis, Minnesota, and the I-85/Piedmont Road fire and subsequent bridge collapse in Atlanta, Georgia, have brought identification of transportation network vulnerabilities to the forefront of UDOT’s planning efforts. Traditional estimates of transportation network impacts have focused on increases to user travel time or the volume of affected traffic, but studies of these disasters have revealed that when facing a degraded transportation network, people adjust their trip making in terms of destination, mode, and …

Development And Validation Of An Analytical Modeling Tool For Solar Borehole Heat Exchangers, Adam Ornelles

All Theses

Current numerical modeling solutions used for subsurface heat flow, such as the Berkeley TOUGH codes, are often difficult to use and time-consuming compared to analytical modeling methods. However, current analytical modeling methods for subsurface heat flow and groundwater cannot accurately model the subsurface in 3 dimensions, a feature paramount to the planning and installation of thermal borehole heat exchangers used in environmental remediation.

This research developed a novel 3-dimensional analytical modeling tool for solar-powered borehole heat exchangers. The analytical modeling tool can plan thermal remediation systems while being more straightforward to operate than current numerical modeling software. By creating a …

Chasing Target Zero: Contributing Factors Of Fatal Crashes In South Carolina, Matthew Stanley

All Theses

South Carolina consistently ranks in the top-10 in fatal crashes per 100,000 capita and 100 million vehicle miles traveled. This thesis summarizes an analysis of contributing factors for fatal crashes in South Carolina. A primary objective of this thesis is to investigate differences in contributing factors for fatal crashes as compared to all crashes in South Carolina. 2018 South Carolina fatal crashes (N=970) and all crashes (N=152,973) were analyzed and compared using classic Venn diagrams to compare differences in contributing factors between fatal crashes and all crashes. Fatal, non-fatal, and all crashes were aggregated into one of seven possible contributing …

Theoretical Development And Numerical Validation Of An Asymmetric Linear Bilateral Control Model For An Automated Truck Platoon, M Sabbir Salek

All Theses

In this study, the author theoretically develops and numerically validates an asymmetric linear bilateral control model (LBCM) for an automated truck platoon, in which the motion information (i.e., position and speed) from the immediate leading truck and the immediate following truck are weighted differently. The novelty of the asymmetric LBCM is that using this model, all the follower trucks in a platoon can adjust their acceleration and deceleration to closely follow a constant desired time headway at all times to improve platoon operational efficiency while maintaining local and string stability. The author theoretically proves the local stability of the asymmetric …

Preferential Flow In Riparian Buffers: Current Research And Future Needs., Derek M. Heeren, Lucie Guertault, Kyle Mankin

Biological Systems Engineering: Papers and Publications

Preferential flow in riparian buffers can substantially compromise their effectiveness in reducing contaminants from overland runoff. The objective of this article is to introduce a collection of five articles on current research into subsurface preferential flow measurement, visualization, modeling, and impacts on contaminant fate and transport at scales ranging from the subsurface pore scale to the plot scale to the watershed scale. This collection presents selected works from a broader invited session on “Preferential flow and piping in riparian buffers” at the 2020 ASABE Annual International Meeting. Major findings include: new methodologies, such as light transmission and geophysics, to characterize …

New Innovations In Pavement Materials And Engineering: A Review On Pavement Engineering Research 2021, Jtte Editorial Office Chang’An Univeristy, Jiaqi Chen, Hancheng Dan, Yongjie Ding, Yangming Gao, Meng Guo, Zhanping You, Et. Al.

Michigan Tech Publications

Sustainable and resilient pavement infrastructure is critical for current economic and environmental challenges. In the past 10 years, the pavement infrastructure strongly supports the rapid development of the global social economy. New theories, new methods, new technologies and new materials related to pavement engineering are emerging. Deterioration of pavement infrastructure is a typical multi-physics problem. Because of actual coupled behaviors of traffic and environmental conditions, predictions of pavement service life become more and more complicated and require a deep knowledge of pavement material analysis. In order to summarize the current and determine the future research of pavement engineering, Journal of …

The Impact Of Increasing Flood Frequency On Flood Inundation: A Case Study Of The Little River In Florida, Maj Amanda Catharina Allen

Theses and Dissertations

Floods are considered one of the most devastating natural hazards and are projected to increase in frequency and magnitude in many places around the world, one of them being Florida. Understanding the potential changes of flood hazards due to climate change is of paramount importance for developing effective flood mitigation procedures and resilient infrastructures. In this work, changes in flood inundation characteristics (flood depth and extent) in response to changes in future flood magnitudes are estimated and analyzed for the Little River basin in northwest Florida. HEC-RAS hydraulic model is set up and validated against observations for the flood event …

Identification Of Phosphorous Loading Point Source Facilities To 303(D) Listed Nutrient Impaired Waters Through Watershed Delineation Using Arcgis For Life Cycle Assessment Applications, John Zimmerman

Chemical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The work done for this project is part of a larger “life cycle assessment (LCA) of novel electrochemical phosphorus recovery technology at the wastewater treatment plant and U.S. watershed scales” (Morrissey 2019). The goal of that LCA is to determine “environmental impacts of implementing electrochemical struvite recovery at the wastewater treatment plant, U.S watershed, and global scales” (Morrissey 2019). This project’s goal is to identify locations deemed more sensitive to eutrophication impacts. The results will be used as part of the life cycle inventory (LCI) accounting for geographically explicit phosphorus flows. The waters identified as impaired were sourced from the …

A Gis-Based Model To Assess On-Site Sewage Facility (Ossf) Contamination Risk To Local Water Resources, Alvaro Garcia

Theses and Dissertations

In a collaborative effort between Texas Water Resources Institute (TWRI), Cameron County Public Health (CCPH), Texas A&M AgriLife Extension (TAMAE), and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), a GIS database that includes relevant OSSF information, such as location, system age, lot size, and other important parameters was created.

This OSSF database, along with publicly available GIS data, was used to create an integrative GIS-based risk assessment model where OSSF risk parameters were assigned a risk factor and combined into a spatial contamination risk for surrounding areas and their receiving waterbodies. Parameters were broken down into two categories: environmental …

Gaylord Produce Removal Machine, Marcus Takashi Hirose Lee, Jacob Michael Perlman, Carissa Abigail Kamm, Mark Misao Loera

Mechanical Engineering

This Final Design Review Report outlines the senior design project that began Winter Quarter of 2021 at California Polytechnic State University. Our team consists of three mechanical engineers and a general engineer, working together to design, build, and test a product for Alameda County Food Bank. The goal of the final product is to relieve volunteers and employees of tedious manual labor and increase efficiency during the removal of produce from large Gaylord containers. This document describes background research, the objectives of the project, chosen concept design, analysis and initial prototyping of said concept, the final design, and verification prototype …