Geological Engineering Commons^™

Vertical Shear Wave Velocity Profiles Generated From Spectral Analysis Of Surface Waves: Field Examples, Neil Lennart Anderson, Genda Chen, Siasi Kociu, Ronaldo Luna, Thanop Thitimakorn, Alexi A. Malovichko, D. Malovichko, D. Shylakov

Genda Chen

Surface wave (Rayleigh wave) seismic data were acquired at six separate bridge sites in southeast Missouri. Each acquired surface wave data set was processed (spectral analysis of surface waves; SASW) and transformed into a site-specific vertical shear-wave velocity profile (SASW shear-wave velocity profile). The SASW shear-wave velocity profiles generated for each bridge site were compared to other geotechnical data including seismic cone penetrometer shear-wave velocity profiles, cross-borehole shear-wave velocity profiles, and borehole lithology logs. The geotechnical data presented herein indicate the SASW shear-wave velocity profiles correlate well with subsurface lithology logs and available cross-borehole shear-wave velocity control. More specifically, clays ...

Structural Assessment Of Highway "N" Power Substation Under Earthquake Loads, Genda Chen, Dongming Yan, Zuocai Wang, Seth Justin, J. David Rogers, Kazi Rezaul Karim

Genda Chen

In this study, the Highway N Substation was analyzed with a finite element model (FEM) for its vulnerability. The 'rigid' bus and electric switch components were characterized with full scale shake table tests. Each component of the substation was carefully modeled with due considerations of mass density, stiffness and geometries. Based on the FEM, modal analysis was conducted to identify the natural frequencies of the structure along with their corresponding mass participation factors. In response spectrum and time history analyses, the dynamic responses of main components, such as 'rigid' buses and switches, were evaluated. The magnitude and location of the ...

Earthquake Hazard Assessment Along Designated Emergency Vehicle Priority Access Routes, Neil Lennart Anderson, Hal Baker, Genda Chen, Tom Hertell, David J. Hoffman, Ronaldo Luna, Yulman Munaf, Shamsher Prakash, Paul Michael Santi, Richard Wesley Stephenson

Genda Chen

Because of the compelling need to reopen vehicular access routes to Sikeston, Cape Girardeau and St. Louis following a devastating earthquake, Missouri Department of Transportation initiated a study of those portions of US 60 and MO 100 that have been officially designated as emergency vehicle priority access routes. The primary objectives of this study were twofold. Objective 1 was to establish a current subsurface and earthquake design geographic information systems (GIS) database for areas in proximity to designated portions of US 60 and MO 100 (includes counties of Butler, Stoddard, New Madrid, Franklin and St. Louis). Objective 2 was to ...

Field Implementation Of Tire Derived Aggregate As Lightweight Backfill For Retaining Walls, Jeremy Labbe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this study was to determine the effectiveness of Tire Derived Aggregate (TDA) as embankment and retaining wall backfill material using data from two field projects supplemented by data from previously published studies. Data collected from the two projects included horizontal earth pressure, resultant forces and moments acting in the wall stem, tensile and compressive forces within the wall, moments at the base of the wall, settlement of the TDA, time dependent temperature fluctuations within TDA, pore pressure changes in underlying foundation soil, movement of the wall face, and movement of the embankment. Data Collection was completed by ...

Automatic Image Classification For Planetary Exploration, Lei Shu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Autonomous techniques in the context of planetary exploration can maximize scientific return and reduce the need for human involvement. This thesis work studies two main problems in planetary exploration: rock image classification and hyperspectral image classification. Since rock textural images are usually inhomogeneous and manually hand-crafting features is not always reliable, we propose an unsupervised feature learning method to autonomously learn the feature representation for rock images. The proposed feature method is flexible and can outperform manually selected features. In order to take advantage of the unlabelled rock images, we also propose self-taught learning technique to learn the feature representation ...

Spatial And Temporal Storm Generation From A Stochastic View, Jiaxiang Ding, Josept D. Revuelta-Acosta, Engel Bernard

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Precipitation is one of the most important parameters in the study of hydrology and most of the research has been done on daily storm generation. Current weather generation models are used to replicate daily or monthly time resolution, which is not able to show the variability within one day or one month. This project deals with sub-daily storm generation with finer resolution and more accurate estimation, which also requires an independent storm separation method. And the Monte Carlo correlated multivariate simulation is applied to compute the variables. The description is essential for soil erosion and water quality research. Another reason ...

Demonstration Of The Gas Assisted Gravity Drainage (Gagd) Process In Carbonate Rocks., Alok Jiteshkumar Shah

LSU Master's Theses

The Gas Assisted Gravity Drainage (GAGD) process was developed and patented by Dr. Rao at LSU in the early 2000s. The process involves the use of several existing or new vertical injection wells to inject gas and use the natural segregation of reservoir fluids from the density difference and the gravitational forces to displace the trapped oil and mobilize the oil downwards to be produced by a horizontal producing well. The GAGD process can be implemented as a secondary or tertiary oil recovery method. Several physical model experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the GAGD process for ...

Sombolestani_Thesis.Pdf, Shayan Sombolestani

Shayan Sombolestani

Hawai'i Wildlife Fund V. County Of Maui, Lowell J. Chandler

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In Hawai’i Wildlife Fund v. County of Maui, the Ninth Circuit held that the plain language of the Clean Water Act provides jurisdiction over indirect discharges of pollutants from a point source into groundwater that is shown to be connected to navigable waters. The court found that studies confirmed pollutants entering the Pacific Ocean were fairly traceable to the County of Maui’s sewage disposal wells. In affirming the district court’s ruling, the Ninth Circuit held that Maui County violated the Clean Water Act by discharging pollutants into a navigable water without the required permit. The court also ...

Mountain Front Recharge In A Semi-Arid Climate, Southwest Montana, Charles Shama

Graduate Theses & Non-Theses

Groundwater recharge to regional valley benches originates largely from adjacent Mountain Front Recharge (MFR). The Madison Valley in Southwest Montana is a semi-arid cold climate that receives 31.75cm annual valley precipitation. In this study, two drainages are characterized and compared, looking at the hydrological processes between the stream and groundwater. North Meadow Creek is a high elevation stream dominated by snowmelt and contains reaches of gaining and losing surface water to groundwater. Daylight Creek is a spring fed disconnected stream. Methods used a surface water balance, temperature as an environmental tracer and two and three component mixing models to ...

Mineralogy And Sulfur Isotope Geochemistry Of The Apex And Bonanza Prospects At The Golden Sunlight Mine, Montana, Hamadou Gnanou

Graduate Theses & Non-Theses

The Golden Sunlight mine, located 50 km to the east of the famous Butte porphyry/lode deposits, is the largest gold mine in Montana, and has produced over 3 million ounces of gold in its 35+ year history. Most of this gold has come from the Mineral Hill breccia pipe (MHBP), a west dipping, cylindrical body of brecciated latite and country rock fragments of the Precambrian LaHood and Greyson Formations. The breccia pipe is late Cretaceous in age (84±18 Ma, DeWitt et al., 1986), is silicified, pyrite-rich, and is mineralized with gold, silver, and minor base metals. Because the ...

Fluid Inclusion And Stable Isotope Investigation Of Hydrothermal Talc And Chlorite Deposits In Southwest Montana, Garrett Hill

Graduate Theses & Non-Theses

Talc and chlorite deposits of southwest Montana formed as hydrothermal replacements of Archean and/or early Proterozoic dolomitic marble and quartzo-feldspathic gneiss. Although the hydrothermal replacement model is generally accepted, less is known about the temperature, composition, and origin of the fluids involved in talc and chlorite formation. The present study examines fluid inclusions in quartz associated with both talc and chlorite, stable hydrogen and oxygen isotopes of talc, chlorite, and quartz, and stable carbon and oxygen isotopes of carbonate minerals. The deposits being examined include the Yellowstone, Beaverhead and Willow Creek talc mines, and the Antler chlorite mine.

Fluid ...

Uav-Based Geotechnical Modeling And Mapping Of An Inaccessible Underground Site, Elizabeth Anne Russell

Graduate Theses & Non-Theses

Digital photogrammetry is becoming a more common method used for mapping geological and structural rock mass features in underground mining. The issue of capturing geological and structural data in inaccessible, unsupported areas of mines remains even when utilizing terrestrial photogrammetric methods; thus, geotechnical models of mines are left with incomplete datasets. Large unsupported underground voids, like stopes, have the potential to cause major failures, but by filling in the geotechnical data gaps in inaccessible areas, potential failures can be predicted through kinematic analysis of the area’s mapped discontinuities. Implementation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in underground mines and recent ...

Characterization Of Peak Shear Strength Of Rough Rock Joints Using The Limited Displacement Multi-Stage Direct Shear (Ldmsd) Test Method, Michael Petro

Graduate Theses & Non-Theses

Current standardized direct shear test methods for rock joints do not account for damage caused to the individually unique asperity profiles of each sample. Current test methods require either a single sample to be sheared to large displacements under successive normal stresses, or the use of similar samples in multiple tests. Successive shearing of a single sample damages surface asperities and causes the overall roughness profile of the sample to change, reducing peak shear stress and consequently resulting in underestimation of friction angle and overestimation of joint shear intercept (cohesion). Obtaining joint surface specimens with identical roughness and geometry is ...

Bathymetry Data For Lakes Azuei And Enriquillo, Michael Piasecki, Mahrokh Moknatian

Publications and Research

This data set supports and forms the basis for the development of Digital Bathymetry Models (DBM) for Lakes Azuei (Haiti) and Enriquillo (Dominican Republic). Bathymetric Data is typically acquired using Sonar devices that measure the depth at specific points along a boat track and for which the longitude and latitude is recorded. From the resulting point cloud one develop a seamless representation of the floor of the lake on either a raster set (which is what we have done) or try to use a contour (vector representation) model in which the depth contours appear as polygons or -lines. The raw ...

Toxicity Screening Of Biochar-Mineral Composites Using Germination Tests, Jan Mumme, Josephine Getz, Munoo Prasad, Ulf Lüder, Kern Jurgen, Ondrej Masek, Wolfram Buss

Articles

This study assessed the properties and toxicity (water cress germination trials) of 38 waste-derived, novel biochar-mineral composites (BMCs) produced via slow pyrolysis and hydrothermal carbonization (hydrochars). The biochars were produced from sewage sludge and compost-like output (CLO) by varying the type of mineral additive (zeolite, wood ash and lignite fly ash), the mineral-to-feedstock ratio and the carbonization process. While pure hydrochars completely inhibited germination of water cress, this effect was ameliorated by mineral additives. Seedlings grew best in pyrolysis chars and while wood ash addition decreased plant growth in many cases, 1:10 addition to CLO doubled germination rate. The ...

Probabilistic Regional Landslide Hazard Assessment For The Enguri Dam (Jivari, Georgia), Maria Diletta Acciaro

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The Enguri Dam forms a reservoir in a seismically active area in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountain range near Jvari, Georgia. The slopes are steep, highly fractured, and weathered, which make them at risk to failure during or following extreme rainfall events. Hydroelectricity produced by the water retained by the 271-m dam provides almost half of the electricity for the country. The reservoir perimeter is more than 40 km and the surrounding slopes span an area of more than 30 km2. The size of the area and paucity of slope data have made slope-failure hazard assessment of the broader ...

The Utility Of Geophysical Techniques To Image The Shallow Subsurface In Karst Areas In Missouri, Nathainail Bashir

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation is composed of three papers, which are focused on the utility of geophysical techniques to imaging the shallow subsurface in karst areas in Missouri.

In the first paper, ground penetrating radar (GPR) and time domain electromagnetic metal detector (TDEM-MD) methods were effectively deployed in an investigation of the cemetery with the intent of locating unmarked graves. The outcome of this study is to expand the knowledge of GPR and TDEM-MD methods, to locate unmarked graves in cemeteries. The study concluded that the GPR method is superior than TDEM-MD to locate buried caskets in cemetery investigations.

In the second ...

Gis-Based Spatial Analysis Coupled With Geophysical Imaging To Identify And Evaluate Factors That Control The Formation Of Karst Sinkholes In Southwestern Missouri, Shishay T. Kidanu

Doctoral Dissertations

"Sinkholes are inherent features of the karst terrain underlying much of Greene County, Missouri. These features present hazards and engineering challenges to existing infrastructure unknowingly constructed on a seemingly benign ground surface. The primary objective of this research was to investigate the physical processes chiefly responsible for triggering the seemingly random distribution of sinkholes in the study area. This research employed an integrated approach encompassing regional scale GIS-based spatial analyses and site-specific geophysical data. GIS-based spatial analysis was employed to identify significant physical factors that appeared to influence the formation and distribution of sinkholes. Seven out of the twelve most ...

The Importance Of Chemical Grouting Materials For Optimum Mechanical Performance With Different Soil Conditions, Yusuf Alper Cinar

Masters Theses

"Grouting is a frequently used technique for controlling the water inflow and reinforcement of soil and rock. Even though cement-based grouting materials have been well characterized, ongoing improvements of chemical grouting materials create a need to better understand the characteristics of these materials in order to increase the efficiency of grouting applications. The purpose of this study is to characterize three common chemical grouting materials by exploring their mechanical performance under varying initial soil conditions. Performance decision criteria consist of the Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) and slake durability test results, observation of penetration ability, and comparison of the findings. The ...