Engineering Commons^™

Shear Strength Of Web-Tapered I-Shaped Members, Ryan Paul Studer

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Plate girders are fabricated in situations where standard structural shapes do not possess the required strength necessary to carry applied loads. In many instances, plate girders are tapered so that the resistance to bending is proportional to the bending moment, creating cost effective, aesthetically pleasing structures. The AISC 2010 Specifications accurately predict the flexural capacity of tapered plate girders but recent research has suggested that the required shear strength is overly conservative. The researchers postulate that the required shear strength is overly conservative due to an effect known as modified shear that has been neglected from the AISC 2010 Specifications …

An Innovative Approach To Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design, Ronnie Clark Graves Ii

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

The Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) developed by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) project 1-37A, is a very powerful tool for the design and analysis of pavements. The designer utilizes an iterative process to select design parameters and predict performance, if the performance is not acceptable they must change design parameters until an acceptable design is achieved.

The design process has more than 100 input parameters across many areas, including, climatic conditions, material properties for each layer of the pavement, and information about the truck traffic anticipated. Many of these parameters are known to have insignificant influence …