Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Thin Film Concrete Coatings, Bobby W. Meade, Danny Wells, Theodore Hopwood Ii, Sudhir Palle

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

KTC researchers obtained eight types of concrete coatings to assess their performance and resistance to chloride penetration. Researchers evaluated eight of the systems in the field and seven in the laboratory. In the field, coatings were applied to a bridge pier that had suffered degradation and chloride contamination. This site will undergo long term monitoring in order to thoroughly evaluate the coating systems. Adhesion of all products in both field and laboratory application was sufficient to provide a durable coating, and ranged from approximately 500 psi to 1,600 psi. Researchers also tested color and gloss changes, which are early indicators …

Chloride Contamination Remediation On Steel Bridges, Bobby W. Meade, Christopher Goff, Sudhir Palle, Theodore Hopwood Ii

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

Researchers evaluated 32 steel surface preparation methods to determine how effectively they remove chloride from corroded chloride-contaminated steel panels. Wet methods proved more effective than dry methods. The three most effective wet methods injected mineral slag abrasives in a water stream and resulted in less than 1% chlorides remaining. Most dry surface preparation methods left significantly more chloride contamination after surface preparation. The three most effective dry methods used multiple blast cleaning cycles. These methods approached the effectiveness of the best wet methods, with 1.6 to 2.0% chlorides remaining. The least effective surface preparation was a single abrasive blast cleaning …

Bridge End Settlement Evaluation And Prediction, Jiwen Zhang, Timothy R. Taylor, Roy E. Sturgill

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

A bridge approach is usually built to provide a smooth and safe transition for vehicles from the roadway pavement to the bridge structure. However, differential settlement between the roadway pavement that rests on embankment fill and the bridge abutment built on more rigid foundation often creates a bump in the roadway. Previous work examined this issue at a microscopic level and presented new methods for eliminating or minimizing the effects at specific locations.

This research studies the problem at a macroscopic level by determining methods to predict settlement severity; this assists designers in developing remediation plans during project development to …

Time Dependent Effect Of Drilling Slurries On Side Shear Resistance Of Drilled Shafts, Warren Allen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Drilled shafts are cylindrical deep foundations constructed by casting fluid concrete into an excavated hole. These elements rely largely on side shear resistance generated by their substantial diameters and lengths to effectively transfer loads. Therefore, an exceptional concrete to soil interface is essential for proper performance of these structures. The FDOT preferred stabilization fluid, bentonite slurry, has been proven to degrade this interface with increased exposure time due to filter cake formation. For this reason, slurry exposure time has been limited to 36 hours by FDOT. Alternately, polymer slurries do not form a filter cake but rather stabilize excavations through …

Behavior Of Fire-Exposed Rc Frames Before And After Jacketing, M. Monir M. Ajan Alhadid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Analysis and design of fire-exposed Reinforced Concrete (RC) frames before and after jacketing with concrete layers are commonly performed using prescriptive methods that rely on the concept of fire rating. These methods were developed based on empirical results on individual RC members subjected to certain fire conditions. In typical fire scenarios, the residual capacity, stiffness and thermal deformations affects not only the local performance of each fire-exposed member, but also the load redistribution and global behavior of the entire frame. In terms of fire safety, the philosophy of the new building codes considers objective-based design as an alternative of the …

Thermal And Fatigue Testing Of Fiber Reinforced Polymer Tie Connectors Used In Concrete Sandwich Walls , Anthony William Post

Anthony Williams

The purpose of this research program was to determine the strength, strain, fatigue, temperature, and other corresponding behavioral characteristics of concrete sandwich wall panels containing the new Delta TieRTM fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) tie connector produced by Dayton/Richmond, a brand of Dayton Superior. The scope of this program included a matrix of three full-scale 40'-0'' wall panels subjected to a 100°F temperature differential, and a matrix of six elemental specimens, three with the ties oriented in the strong direction (parallel tie orientation) and three with the ties oriented in the weak direction (perpendicular tie orientation), subjected to cyclic load tests …

Scene Projection By Non-Linear Transforms To A Geo-Referenced Map For Situational Awareness, Kevin C. Krucki, Vijayan K. Asari

Vijayan K. Asari

There are many transportation and surveillance cameras currently in use in major cities that are close to the ground and show scenes from a perspective point of view. It can be difficult to follow an object of interest across multiple cameras if many of these cameras are in the same area due to the different orientations of these cameras. This is especially true when compared to wide area aerial surveillance (WAAS). To correct this problem, this research provides a method to non-linearly transform current camera perspective views into real world coordinates that can be placed on a map. Using a …

Recent Progress In Wide-Area Surveillance: Protecting Our Pipeline Infrastructure, Vijayan K. Asari, Paheding Sidike, Chen Cui, Varun Santhaseelan

Vijayan K. Asari

The pipeline industry has millions of miles of pipes buried along the length and breadth of the country. Since none of the areas through which pipelines run are to be used for other activities, it needs to be monitored so as to know whether the right-of-way (RoW) of the pipeline is encroached upon at any point in time. Rapid advances made in the area of sensor technology have enabled the use of high end video acquisition systems to monitor the RoW of pipelines. The images captured by aerial data acquisition systems are affected by a host of factors that include …

Webinar: Transit Signal Priority Evaluation And Performance Measures, Miguel Figliozzi

TREC Webinar Series

Transit signal priority (TSP) can reduce transit delay at signalized intersections by making phasing adjustments. TSP is a relatively inexpensive tool to provide faster and more reliable transit service. This webinar addresses TSP real-word performance measures as well as data integration and evaluation challenges. Results of the TSP evaluation in an arterial corridor in Portland, Oregon indicate that a timely and effective TSP system requires a high degree of sophistication, monitoring, and maintenance. TSP timing is crucial to reduce transit delay.

Key takeaways include: performance measures, methodology, analysis of early green and red extension pros and cons, novel real-world results.

The Purdue Agro-Climatic (Pac) Dataset For The U.S. Corn Belt: Development And Initial Results, Xing Liu, Elin Jacobs, Anil Kumar, Larry Biehl, Jeff Andersen, Dev Niyogi

Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Faculty Publications

This study is a result of a project titled ‘‘Useful to Usable (U2U): Transforming Climate Variability and Change Information for Cereal Crop Producers”. This paper responds to the project goal to improve farm resiliency and proftability in the U.S. Corn Belt region by transforming existing meteorological dataset into usable knowledge and tools for the agricultural community.

A high-resolution agro-climatic dataset that covers the U.S. Corn Belt was built for the U2U project based on a Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS) framework. This data referred to as the Purdue Agro-climatic (PAC) dataset is a gridded, continuous dataset suitable for agrocli- matic …

Multiscale Wind Modelling For Sustainability And Resilience, Djordje Romanic

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The research presented herein is a mix of meteorological and wind engineering disciplines. In many cases, there is a gap between these two fields and this thesis is an attempt to bridge that gap through multiscale wind modelling approaches. Data and methods used in this study cover a multitude of spatial and temporal scales. Applications are in the fields of sustainability and resilience. This relationship between multiscale wind modelling and sustainability and resilience is investigated examining several case studies of three different developments: urban, rural and coastal.

An urban wind modelling methodology is proposed and applied for a specific development …

Collapse Resistance Of Moment Resisting Frame And Shear Wall Rc Structural Systems Exposed To Blast, Alaa I. Chehab, Christopher D. Eamon, Joshua Griffin

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research Publications

Various characteristics of a structure influence its response when subjected to a blast load. This has important implications for survivability and resistance to progressive collapse. In this study, the effect of the type of lateral load resisting system on reinforced concrete building resistance to progressive collapse when exposed to blast load is examined. Fourteen different reinforced concrete structures were considered for analysis, with five structures designed as moment resisting frames and nine designed as shear walls systems. Buildings with 3, 6, and 10 stories with 3, 4, and 5-bay symmetric configurations were considered. The structures were exposed to external and …

E. Coli Removal By Pleurotus Ostreatus Mycofilter In Simulated Wet Environmental Pond, Savannah E. Martinez

Civil Engineering ETDs

Stormwater runoff has been referred to as the water quality issue of the day. Contamination of surface waters is an environmental concern for both human and ecosystem health. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, it is a common practice to pond stormwater runoff before it is released into the Rio Grande. Ponding stormwater works as a best management practice (BMP) to help remove floatable debris and contaminants. Mycofiltration is a BMP that has recently been introduced into the stormwater quality community. Mycofiltration is the use of fungal mycelium as a natural mitigation approach to stormwater pollution. Mycofiltration has been proven to reduce …

Data Provisioning For The Object Modeling System (Oms), Jack R. Carlson, Olaf David, Wes J. Lloyd, George H. Leavesley, Ken W. Rojas, Timothy R. Green, Mazdak Arabi, Lucas Yaege, Hom Kipka

Wes Lloyd

The Object Modelling System (OMS) platform supports initiatives to build or re-factor agro-environmental models and deploy them in different business contexts as model services on cloud computing platforms. Whether traditional desktop, client-server, or emerging cloud deployments, success especially at the enterprise level relies on stable and efficient data provisioning to the models. In this paper we describe recent experience and trends with tools and services deployed to cloud platforms. Also, systematic, sustained data stewardship and alignment with standards organizations impart stability to data provisioning efforts.

The Virtual Machine (Vm) Scaler: An Infrastructure Manager Supporting Environmental Modeling On Iaas Clouds, Wes J. Lloyd, Olaf David, Mazdak Arabi, James C. Ascough Ii, Timothy R. Green, Jack R. Carlson, Ken W. Rojas

Wes Lloyd

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds provide a new medium for deployment of environmental modeling applications. Harnessing advancements in virtualization, IaaS clouds can provide dynamic scalable infrastructure to better support scientific modeling computational demands. Providing scientific modeling “as-a-service” requires dynamic scaling of server infrastructure to adapt to changing user workloads. This paper presents the Virtual Machine (VM) Scaler, an autonomic resource manager for IaaS Clouds. We have developed VM-Scaler, a REST/JSON-based web services application which supports infrastructure provisioning and management to support scientific modeling for the Cloud Services Innovation Platform (CSIP) [Lloyd et al. 2012]. VM-Scaler harnesses the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) …

The Effects Of Furfural On Biological Hydrogen Production In Batch And Microbial Electrolysis Cell, Hyeongu Yeo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Furfural inhibits biohydrogen production and numerous studies has been carried out on detoxification of furfural to enhance biofuel production. Electrochemical detoxification of furfural is a new approach to remove furfural without the degradation of sugars. However, there is limited information on the effects of the degradation products of furfural on biohydrogen production in batch tests and the impact of furfural on anode-respiring bacteria (ARB) in microbial electrolysis cells (MECs). This study investigated the effect of furfural and its derivatives, furfuryl alcohol (FFA) and 2-furoic acid (FA), on biohydrogen production. The impact of furfural on hydrogen production in MECs was also …

Investigation Of Future Flow Reducer Sizes In Houses Added To An Existing Gravity Flow Water System To Ensure Its Sustainability, Michelle Roy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Goal 6 of the United Nations Development Program’s new Sustainable Development Goals aims to ensure availability of clean water and sustainable management practices to all by the year 2030. Peace Corps Panama partners with communities in order to help provide sustainable water solutions to communities in need. Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Volunteers spend at least two years living in a community to identify and implement solutions to water problems and train local water committees on how to maintain their improved systems. A common solution for unequal distribution of flow in the distribution network of a gravity flow water system …

Hydroshare – A Case Study Of The Application Of Modern Software Engineering To A Large Distributed Federally-Funded Scientific Software Development Project, Ray Idaszak, David G. Tarboton, Hong Yi, Laura Christopherson, Michael J. Stealey, Brian Miles, Pabitra Dash, Alva Couch, Calvin Spealman, Jeffery S. Horsburgh, Daniel P. Ames

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

HydroShare is an online collaborative system under development to support the open sharing of hydrologic data, analytical tools, and computer models. With HydroShare, scientists can easily discover, access, and analyze hydrologic data and thereby enhance the production and reproducibility of hydrologic scientific results. HydroShare also takes advantage of emerging social media functionality to enable users to enhance information about and collaboration around hydrologic data and models. HydroShare is being developed by an interdisciplinary collaborative team of domain scientists, university software developers, and professional software engineers from ten institutions located across the United States. While the combination of non–co-located, diverse stakeholders …

Feasibility Study Of Land Cover Classification Based On Normalized Difference Vegetation Index For Landslide Risk Assessment, Thilanki Dahigamuwa, Qiuyan Yu, Manjriker Gunaratne

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Unfavorable land cover leads to excessive damage from landslides and other natural hazards, whereas the presence of vegetation is expected to mitigate rainfall-induced landslide potential. Hence, unexpected and rapid changes in land cover due to deforestation would be detrimental in landslide-prone areas. Also, vegetation cover is subject to phenological variations and therefore, timely classification of land cover is an essential step in effective evaluation of landslide hazard potential. The work presented here investigates methods that can be used for land cover classification based on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), derived from up-to-date satellite images, and the feasibility of application …

Foundation Effects Of Trees Under Wind Loads, Padmavathi Venkata Sagi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Winching tests were conducted on a mature 24-year-old Norway spruce tree. The tree was instrumented with strain gauges along the root structure and tilt sensors along the tree stem and was winched to failure. Tracked tree-root system response to failure load and the material properties of the tree-root-soil system were used to examine the applicability of simple engineering principles to tree stability analysis. Tree stability was studied using the principles of Winkler foundation model for the first time. In order to study the very complex windthrow phenomenon, a novel experimental technique was used. Tree saplings with complete structural root systems …