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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Effective Early Treatment Of Microcystis Exponential Growth And Microcystin Production With Hydrogen Peroxide And Hydroxyapatite, Ian Struewing, Nathan Sienkiewicz, Chiqian Zhang, Nicholas Dugan, Jingrang Lu Dec 2020

Effective Early Treatment Of Microcystis Exponential Growth And Microcystin Production With Hydrogen Peroxide And Hydroxyapatite, Ian Struewing, Nathan Sienkiewicz, Chiqian Zhang, Nicholas Dugan, Jingrang Lu

Faculty Publications

: Mitigating cyanotoxin production is essential to protecting aquatic ecosystems and public health. However, current harmful cyanobacterial bloom (HCB) control strategies have significant shortcomings. Because predicting HCBs is difficult, current HCB control strategies are employed when heavy HCBs have already occurred. Our pilot study developed an effective HCB prediction approach that is employed before exponential cyanobacterial growth and massive cyanotoxin pro‐ duction can occur. We used a quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assay targeting the toxin‐encoding gene mcyA to signal the timing of treatment. When control measures were applied at an early growth stage or one week before the exponential …


Improving Tolerance Control On Modular Construction Project With 3d Laser Scanning And Bim: A Case Study Of Removable Floodwall Project, Huimin Li, Chengyi Zhang, Siyuan Song, Sevilay Demirkesen, Ruidong Chang Dec 2020

Improving Tolerance Control On Modular Construction Project With 3d Laser Scanning And Bim: A Case Study Of Removable Floodwall Project, Huimin Li, Chengyi Zhang, Siyuan Song, Sevilay Demirkesen, Ruidong Chang

Faculty Publications

Quality control is essential to a successful modular construction project and should be enhanced throughout the project from design to construction and installation. The current methods for analyzing the assembly quality of a removable floodwall heavily rely on manual inspection and contact-type measurements, which are time-consuming and costly. This study presents a systematic and practical approach to improve quality control of the prefabricated modular construction projects by integrating building information modeling (BIM) with three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning technology. The study starts with a thorough literature review of current quality control methods in modular construction. Firstly, the critical quality control procedure …


United States Department Of Defense (Dod) Real Property Repair, Alterations, Maintenance, And Construction Project Contract Data: 2009–2020, Tyler Stout, Adam Teston, Brent T. Langhals, Justin D. Delorit, Carlton Hendrix, Steven J. Schuldt Oct 2020

United States Department Of Defense (Dod) Real Property Repair, Alterations, Maintenance, And Construction Project Contract Data: 2009–2020, Tyler Stout, Adam Teston, Brent T. Langhals, Justin D. Delorit, Carlton Hendrix, Steven J. Schuldt

Faculty Publications

Nearly one-half of all construction projects exceed planned costs and schedule, globally [1]. Owners and construction managers can analyze historical project performance data to inform cost and schedule overrun risk-reduction strategies. Though, the majority of open-source project datasets are limited by the number of projects, data dimensionality, and location. A significant global customer of the construction industry, the Department of Defense (DoD) maintains a vast database of historical project data that can be used to determine the sources and magnitude of construction schedule and cost overruns for many continental and international locations. The selection of data provided by the authors …


Multihazard Hurricane Fragility Model For Wood Structure Homes Considering Hazard Parameters And Building Attributes Interaction, Carol C. Massarra, Carol J. Friedland, Brian D. Marx, J. Casey Dietrich Sep 2020

Multihazard Hurricane Fragility Model For Wood Structure Homes Considering Hazard Parameters And Building Attributes Interaction, Carol C. Massarra, Carol J. Friedland, Brian D. Marx, J. Casey Dietrich

Faculty Publications

Predicting building damage as a function of hurricane hazards, building attributes, and the interaction between hazard and building attributes is a key to understanding how significant interaction reflects variation hazard intensity effect on damage based on building attribute levels. This paper develops multihazard hurricane fragility models for wood structure homes considering interaction between hazard and building attributes. Fragility models are developed for ordered categorical damage states (DS) and binary collapse/no collapse. Exterior physical damage and building attributes from rapid assessment in coastal Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina (2005), high-resolution numerical hindcast hazard intensities from the Simulating WAves Nearshore and ADvanced CIRCulation …


Conceptual Study Of A Real-Time Hybrid Simulation Framework For Monopile Offshore Wind Turbines Under Wind And Wave Loads, Wei Song, Chao Sun, Yanhui Zuo, Vahid Jahangiri, Yan Lu, Qinghua Han Aug 2020

Conceptual Study Of A Real-Time Hybrid Simulation Framework For Monopile Offshore Wind Turbines Under Wind And Wave Loads, Wei Song, Chao Sun, Yanhui Zuo, Vahid Jahangiri, Yan Lu, Qinghua Han

Faculty Publications

As an attractive renewable energy source, offshore wind plants are becoming increasingly popular for energy production. However, the performance assessment of offshore wind turbine (OWT) structure is a challenging task due to the combined wind-wave loading and difficulties in reproducing such loading conditions in laboratory. Real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS), combining physical testing and numerical simulation in real-time, offers a new venue to study the structural behavior of OWTs. It overcomes the scaling incompatibilities in OWT scaled model testing by replacing the rotor components with an actuation system, driven by an aerodynamic simulation tool running in real-time. In this study, a …


Data Quality And Reliability Assessment Of Wearable Emg And Imu Sensor For Construction Activity Recognition, Srikanth Sagar Bangaru, Chao Wang, Fereydoun Aghazadeh Aug 2020

Data Quality And Reliability Assessment Of Wearable Emg And Imu Sensor For Construction Activity Recognition, Srikanth Sagar Bangaru, Chao Wang, Fereydoun Aghazadeh

Faculty Publications

The workforce shortage is one of the significant problems in the construction industry. To overcome the challenges due to workforce shortage, various researchers have proposed wearable sensor-based systems in the area of construction safety and health. Although sensors provide rich and detailed information, not all sensors can be used for construction applications. This study evaluates the data quality and reliability of forearm electromyography (EMG) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) of armband sensors for construction activity classification. To achieve the proposed objective, the forearm EMG and IMU data collected from eight participants while performing construction activities such as screwing, wrenching, lifting, …


Groundwater Level Mapping Tool: An Open Source Web Application For Assessing Groundwater Sustainability, Steven W. Evans, Norman L. Jones, Gustavious P. Williams, Daniel P. Ames, E. James Nelson Jul 2020

Groundwater Level Mapping Tool: An Open Source Web Application For Assessing Groundwater Sustainability, Steven W. Evans, Norman L. Jones, Gustavious P. Williams, Daniel P. Ames, E. James Nelson

Faculty Publications

Decision makers need an accurate understanding of aquifer storage trends to effectively manage groundwater resources. Groundwater is difficult to monitor and quantify since the data collected from monitoring wells are often available only at irregular and infrequent intervals. We present an open-source web application (app) to visualize groundwater data over time and automatically calculate changes in aquifer storage volume to help managers assess aquifer sustainability. This app uses a novel multi-linear regression (MLR) algorithm to impute missing data for infrequently sampled wells, using correlated data from other wells in the same aquifer. The app uses this MLR-imputed data to spatially …


Exploiting Earth Observation Data To Impute Groundwater Level Measurements With An Extreme Learning Machine, Steven Evans, Gustavious P. Williams, Norman L. Jones, Daniel P. Ames, E. James Nelson Jun 2020

Exploiting Earth Observation Data To Impute Groundwater Level Measurements With An Extreme Learning Machine, Steven Evans, Gustavious P. Williams, Norman L. Jones, Daniel P. Ames, E. James Nelson

Faculty Publications

Groundwater resources are expensive to develop and use; they are difficult to monitor and data collected from monitoring wells are often sporadic, often only available at irregular, infrequent, or brief intervals. Groundwater managers require an accurate understanding of historic groundwater storage trends to effectively manage groundwater resources, however, most if not all well records contain periods of missing data. To understand long-term trends, these missing data need to be imputed before trend analysis. We present a method to impute missing data at single wells, by exploiting data generated from Earth observations that are available globally. We use two soil moisture …


The Viability And Simplicity Of 3d-Printed Construction: A Military Case Study, Jeneé A. Jagoda, Brandy Diggs-Mcgee, Megan Kreiger, Steven J. Schuldt Apr 2020

The Viability And Simplicity Of 3d-Printed Construction: A Military Case Study, Jeneé A. Jagoda, Brandy Diggs-Mcgee, Megan Kreiger, Steven J. Schuldt

Faculty Publications

In November 2019, U.S. Marines, Air Force, and Army Corps of Engineers personnel demonstrated the viability and simplicity of three-dimensionally (3D)-printed construction in a controlled environment at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center—Construction Engineering Research Laboratory in Champaign, Illinois. The tri-service exercise spanned three days and culminated in the construction of three 1 m × 1 m × 1 m (3 ft × 3 ft × 3 ft) concrete dragon’s teeth (square pyramid military fortifications used to defend against tanks and armored vehicles) and several custom-designed objects. The structural components were printed using a custom-built, gantry-style printer called …


Analysis Of Military Construction Cost Growth In Usaf Major Defense Acquisition Programs, Emily E. Angell, Edward D. White, Jonathan D. Ritschel, Alfred E. Thal Jr. Apr 2020

Analysis Of Military Construction Cost Growth In Usaf Major Defense Acquisition Programs, Emily E. Angell, Edward D. White, Jonathan D. Ritschel, Alfred E. Thal Jr.

Faculty Publications

This study uses descriptive and inferential statistics to identify cost growth Analysis of Military Construction of military construction (MILCON) at the programmatic level, while bridging the gap between Selected Acquisition Report (SAR) estimates and actual project costs. Findings of this study aid the cost community with appropriate allocation of resources in developing these estimates. Overall, Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAP) appear to experience more negative growth (cost savings) in MILCON estimates on reviewed SARs— typically less than 0.2% of the total program cost. SAR estimates became more accurate from the first to last SAR in comparison to the total MILCON …


Over Height Impact Avoidance And Incident Detection System, Suvash Chapain, Aly Mousaad Aly Mar 2020

Over Height Impact Avoidance And Incident Detection System, Suvash Chapain, Aly Mousaad Aly

Faculty Publications

During the construction and repair of bridges, work platforms or construction-related containment may result in restricted vertical clearances at a work location. Some tractor-trailer combinations are prone to over-height collisions at these locations. Collisions are a hazard to all drivers, and repair of the damage typically causes traffic delays. Appropriate solutions to this problem will focus on the prevention of collisions by detecting over-height vehicles and directing the drivers to take an alternate safe route. This presentation addresses the design and functionality of smart detection/alert systems that can be set up well in advance of a known vertical clearance restriction …


Wireless Underground Communications In Sewer And Stormwater Overflow Monitoring: Radio Waves Through Soil And Asphalt Medium, Usman Raza, Abdul Salam Feb 2020

Wireless Underground Communications In Sewer And Stormwater Overflow Monitoring: Radio Waves Through Soil And Asphalt Medium, Usman Raza, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

Storm drains and sanitary sewers are prone to backups and overflows due to extra amount wastewater entering the pipes. To prevent that, it is imperative to efficiently monitor the urban underground infrastructure. The combination of sensors system and wireless underground communication system can be used to realize urban underground IoT applications, e.g., storm water and wastewater overflow monitoring systems. The aim of this article is to establish a feasibility of the use of wireless underground communications techniques, and wave propagation through the subsurface soil and asphalt layers, in an underground pavement system for storm water and sewer overflow monitoring application. …


Improving Construction Work Zone Safety Using Technology: A Systematic Review Of Applicable Technologies, Chukwuma Nnaji, John Gambatese, Hyun Woo Lee, Fan Zhang Feb 2020

Improving Construction Work Zone Safety Using Technology: A Systematic Review Of Applicable Technologies, Chukwuma Nnaji, John Gambatese, Hyun Woo Lee, Fan Zhang

Faculty Publications

© 2019 The Authors Once considered conventional, the construction industry is gradually increasing its reliance on innovations such as the application of technologies in safety management. Given the growing literature on technology applications in safety management and the varying opinions on the utility of applied technologies, a systematic review that streamlines findings from past studies is indispensable to construction stakeholders. Although a number of review studies are available in the building construction sector, the level of fragmentation and uniqueness within the construction industry necessitates a review study specifically targeting the heavy civil sector. In response, the present study applies a …


Peak Pressures On Low Rise Buildings: Cfd With Les Versus Full Scale And Wind Tunnel Measurements, Aly Mousaad Aly, Hamzeh Gol-Zaroudi Jan 2020

Peak Pressures On Low Rise Buildings: Cfd With Les Versus Full Scale And Wind Tunnel Measurements, Aly Mousaad Aly, Hamzeh Gol-Zaroudi

Faculty Publications

This paper focuses on the processes of wind flow in the atmospheric boundary layer, to produce realistic full-scale pressures for the design of low-rise buildings. CFD with LES turbulence closure is implemented on a scale 1:1 prototype building. A proximity study was executed computationally in CFD with LES that suggests new recommendations on the computational domain size, in front of a building model, apart from common RANS-based guidelines (e.g. COST and AIJ). Our findings suggest a location of the test building, different from existing guidelines, and the inflow boundary proximity influences pressure correlation and reproduction of peak loads. The CFD …


Internet Of Things For Sustainable Mining, Abdul Salam Jan 2020

Internet Of Things For Sustainable Mining, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

The sustainable mining Internet of Things deals with the applications of IoT technology to the coupled needs of sustainable recovery of metals and a healthy environment for a thriving planet. In this chapter, the IoT architecture and technology is presented to support development of a digital mining platform emphasizing the exploration of rock–fluid–environment interactions to develop extraction methods with maximum economic benefit, while maintaining and preserving both water quantity and quality, soil, and, ultimately, human health. New perspectives are provided for IoT applications in developing new mineral resources, improved management of tailings, monitoring and mitigating contamination from mining. Moreover, tools …