Engineering Commons^™

Veterans Memorial Park In Colon, Mi, Madelyn Landry

Honors Theses

Located in St. Joseph County, MI, the Village of Colon offers a charming small-town feel and a close connection with nature. For this project, our team will be working to create a new design for a small community park located in the downtown area of Colon along the shores of Palmer Lake. The American Legion is seeking to re-imagine the park into a Veterans memorial to celebrate the service of village residents who have served in the armed forces. Elements requested to be incorporated into the memorial include granite stonework with etched displays, flags for each branch of the military, …

Subdivision Site Design In Antwerp Township, Peyton Smith

Honors Theses

Design and development of a subdivision on an empty plot of land off Red Arrow Highway in Antwerp Township, MI.

Subdivision Site Design In Antwerp Township, Alec Denbraber

Honors Theses

Design and development of a subdivision on an empty plot of land off Red Arrow Highway in Antwerp Township, MI.

Western Michigan University Main Campus Parking Garage, Brendan Graham

Honors Theses

Student parking when attending class seems to be an issue at most universities. At Western Michigan University, it is a particular issue near the Haworth College of Business and Rood Hall. Students regularly struggle to find parking spaces in a timely manner when attending class in this area. Parking in this area currently consists solely of asphalt parking lots. It was our goal to both increase parking capacity and green space in this area. We will do this by designing a multi-level parking garage that will provide a more efficient use of parking space. As you will see later on, …

Roundabout Design At Clare Ave And Us 127, Clare, Mi, Elise Olson

Honors Theses

For our senior design project, we conducted an intersection improvement in Clare Michigan. On the north end of Clare at the interchange of US-127 and Clare Avenue, the Michigan Department of Transportation has been working with the Clare County Road Commission in an effort to redo this interchange. The ideal interchange will be a roundabout that includes the entrance and exit ramps of NB US-127, NB and SB Clare Ave, and Colonville Road. With the assistance of AutoCAD, PTV Vistro, and Microsoft Project, our team conducted a full roundabout design and park & ride redesign. Our team then developed an …

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, …

Performance Evaluation Of Transportation Systems For Sustainability And Smart-Growth Of Cities: An Integrated Assessment Of Health Impacts, Ahmad Feizi

Dissertations

The performance of transportation systems is a significant component that influences the quality of life. The performance evaluation refers to a process of determining how well transportation systems perform regarding their intended goals and objectives. The advancement of information and communication technology and the integration between transportation systems and advanced technologies have directed more attention to the concept of smart cities. Smart cities are constituted of several interrelated components. Therefore, this offers comprehensive and integrated frameworks to evaluate the transportation performance and understanding of multifaceted interactions between the components from a transportation engineering perspective in four sections.

In the first …

Data Mining Of Unstructured Textual Information In Transportation Safety Domain: Exploring Methods, Opportunities And Limitations, Keneth Morgan Kwayu

Dissertations

The unprecedented increase in volume and influx of structured and unstructured data has overwhelmed conventional data management system capabilities in organizing, analyzing, and procuring useful information in a timely fashion. Structured data sources have a pre-defined pattern that makes data preprocessing and information retrieval tasks relatively easy for the current technologies that have been designed to handle structured and repeatable data. Unlike structured data, unstructured data usually exists in an unorganized format that offers no or little insight unless indexed and stored in an organized fashion. The inherent format of unstructured data exacerbates difficulties in data preprocessing and information extraction. …

Medical Service Facility Site Development, Sabrina Carvajal

Honors Theses

This report provides a clear description of a site development design project for a future medical service facility. The site is approximately 46,818 square feet and is located at 203 E. Centre Avenue Portage, Michigan 49002 United States. This is in a high traffic area that is surrounded by different public and academic institutions including Portage Central High School and Portage Public Library. The commercial buildings surrounding this area are Comerica Bank, Dairy Queen and a new Senior Center currently under construction. Our team is proposing two different site-layout options for the future development of this building. This medical service …

Housing Pre-Fabrication And Resource Optimization, Emma Dubensky

Honors Theses

Enclosure during construction is often time-consuming, expensive, and at the mercy of the weather. By introducing methods for manufacturing prefabricated enclosure components such as wall panels and roof sections, the impact of the three major variables is reduced. Designs for trusses, roof sections, wall sections, and foundations were developed and selected using civil engineering principles; and manufacturing and logistical processes were optimized using engineering and project management skill sets. These multi-disciplinary efforts were combined to create an accessible and versatile set of designs and instructions that can improve the effectiveness of both a skilled and non-skilled volunteer workforce. By creating …

Housing Prefabrication And Resource Optimization, Megan Scherpereel

Honors Theses

Enclosure during construction is often time-consuming, expensive, and at the mercy of the weather. By introducing methods for manufacturing prefabricated enclosure components such as wall panels and roof sections, the impact of the three major variables is reduced. Designs for trusses, roof sections, wall sections, and foundations were developed and selected using civil engineering principles; and manufacturing and logistical processes were optimized using engineering and project management skill sets. These multi-disciplinary efforts were combined to create an accessible and versatile set of designs and instructions that can improve the effectiveness of both a skilled and non-skilled volunteer workforce. By creating …

Analyzing Impacts Of Transportation And Non-Transportation Activities On Human Health With An Advanced Platform For Collecting Travel And Physical Activity Data, Raed Abdullah Hasan

Dissertations

Recently much attention is paid to the lack of physical activities that may cause the health problems in many counties. Travel activities provide a certain amount of physical activities, and the active transportation, such as walking and cycling, becomes more important as an essential element of transportation. The active transportation is expected to contribute to improving human health by reducing cardiovascular disease, obesity, and premature death. However, detailed relationship between the transportation choices and human health has not been well understood. Therefore, there is a need for investigating traveler behaviors and how their choices affect physical activities and public health. …

Fatigue Performance Of Rc Beams Strengthened With Near Surface Mounted Cfrp Composites, Tamer Ghaith Mousa Eljufout

Dissertations

Bridges have a fundamental role in improving the effectiveness of highways and providing an expedient and express traffic system. Over time, Reinforced Concrete (RC) bridges degrade due to gradually increased traffic loads and environmental deteriorations. Subsequently, service loads might cause higher stresses in concrete and steel reinforcement than stresses considered in the design stage. This affects the structural performance of RC beams and leads to sudden fatigue failure. As such, there is an essential need for rehabilitation to avoid hazards and tragedies.

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) composites are becoming widely used to strengthen RC bridges. Near Surface Mounted (NSM) …

Assessing Infrastructure Elements Using Automated Object Detection Technique In Smart City Applications, Majid Mastali

Dissertations

Nowadays, road features are becoming more complex leading to more complicated complaints regarding urban environments. Point Cloud Data (PCD) processing is an essential element for detecting objects and analysing human driving behavior to identify the variables defining challenging objects and maneuvers in smart cities. PCDs include a range of processing, including indirect processing (e.g., data converting, cleaning process) and direct process (e.g., pass through elevation filter, statistical outlier removal, normal estimation as well as classification). Static and dynamic object detection and analysis are typically considered the most sophisticated options subsumed under PCDs. They involve direct evaluation of both static and …

The Urban Development Of Bronson Circle, Matthew Moulton

Honors Theses

Many suburban streets, and specifically Bronson Circle, in the city of Kalamazoo are in poor condition and in need of repair. Along with a new pavement design and additional drainage considerations, a complete redesign of the street’s cross-section with the concept of a “Complete Street” was created. A redesign of the site, traffic, pavement, drainage, and lighting were completed to lessen the street’s impact on the environment and make it more user friendly for all modes of transportation. This complete street design can be adjusted for terrain and used for any comparable urban street.

Included in this report is an …

The Passive Effects Of Full-Gateway, In-Street Signs On Vehicular Speed, De'lon Dixon

Masters Theses

Reducing motorist’s speed when approaching crosswalks is an important goal in reducing the number of collision between motorist and pedestrian in crosswalks. The current study addresses this goal. The effect of gateway installation of in-street signs (one in-street sign installed between the two travel lanes in each direction and one on both edges of the roadway in each direction) on vehicle speed was evaluated on nine roads. The results demonstrated that the Gateway in-street sign treatment produced large speed reductions as vehicles approached the crosswalk and at the crosswalk. The average speed reduction was 3.8 mph at the crosswalk and …

Enabling Robust Distributed Real-Time Hybrid Simulation Method And Expanding Its Applications In Floating Wind Turbine Systems, Mehmet Cinar

Masters Theses

Real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS), which integrates physical experiment and numerical simulation, plays an essential role in understanding the time-dependent behavior of structures when subject to hazardous loadings. On the other hand, RTHS might not yield accurate results for complex structural systems due to experimental and computational limitations. Distributed real-time hybrid simulation (dRTHS), which takes the advantage of distributed laboratory facilities using network communications, was proposed and proven to address some limitations in RTHS. During dRTHS, Internet delay due to the network communication is added to the actuator delay in RTHS, which may cause inaccurate results or even unstable tests. To …

Maintaining Deck Profile In Steel I-Girder Bridges During Deck Placement, Ali Naif Inceefe

Masters Theses

Conventional steel I-girder highway bridges utilize cast-in-place concrete deck. Maintaining the deck profile as per project specifications might be a challenging task. Deformation of girders and formwork used for deck placement need to be controlled during deck placement. Differential deflection between girders, exterior girder web out-of-plane deformation, exterior girder warping, or a combination thereof could impact the deck profile. These deformations challenge maintaining deck profile and need to be considered as a part of constructability evaluation. Determining deck profile due to potential girder deformations is necessary before deck placement so that the remedial actions can be implemented when deck finish …

Deterioration Prediction Modeling For The Condition Assessment Of Concrete Bridge Decks, Aqeed Moshin Chyad

Dissertations

Bridges are key elements in the US transportation system. There are more than six hundred thousand bridges on the highway system in the United States. Approximately one third of these bridges are in need of maintenance and will cost more than $120 billion to rehabilitate or repair. Several factors affect the performance of bridges over their life spans. Identifying these factors and accurately assessing the condition of bridges are critical in the development of an effective maintenance program. While there are several methods available for condition assessment, selecting the best technique remains a challenge. Therefore, developing an accurate and reliable …

From Architectural Design To Structural Analysis: A Data-Driven Approach To Study Building Information Modeling (Bim) Interoperability, Mohammed Aldegeily

Masters Theses

BIM has been playing an essential role in building construction projects in recent years. It was used to automate many tasks such as clash detection, 4D planning, and quantity takeoff, among others. However, the interoperability of BIM still lacks in many fields across the architecture, engineering, and construction domains. This research studies the interoperability between architectural design and structural analysis. The goal is to explore structural analysis of BIM models through data transfer processes between different software platforms via three types of paths: (1) Application Programming Interface (API); (2) “immediately connect,” which is the direct link between software programs from …

Ceas Student Center Expansion, Turner Solterman

Honors Theses

Western Michigan University has had a long-standing tradition of engineering excellence. To keep up with the modern culture and to maintain that Western will be on the forefront of universities providing an excellent engineering education, an expansion to the current CEAS building on the Parkview campus is necessary. Aptly named the CEAS Student Center Expansion, this project will be a space exclusively for student engineering groups to work in a space where collaboration across different engineering disciplines will be as easy as walking across the floor to talk to someone else. Through the floor plans of the different alternatives …

Implementing Online Updating To Complex Hysteresis Models In Real- Time Hybrid Simulation Using Constrained Unscented Kalman Filter, Bilal Ahmed Mohammed

Masters Theses

Although conventional experimental methods, such as quasi-static testing, shake table testing, etc., perform well to evaluate structural seismic performance necessary for modern seismic design, the quasi-static loading and/or reduced scale specimen used in shake table testing may not provide true dynamic responses of structural systems. To overcome these limitations, real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) was developed, which is a combination of physical testing of the experimental substructure and analytical simulation of the numerical substructure. With the advancement of hybrid simulation, it is now possible to economically test large to full-scale specimens in laboratories at the real earthquake rate. Online model updating …

I-94 Advanced Bridge Replacement, Saleem Alsharari

Honors Theses

The Michigan Department of Transportation has always felt the need of improving and increasing the capacity of the most critical highway in the state of Michigan, I-94. Part of the improvement plan is to increase the capacity of a 6-mile segment along a corridor of I-94 from French Avenue to Trumbull Avenue which is in a suburban neighborhood of Detroit. There are eight bridges built in the 1950’s that need to be re-constructed for a capacity increase. Vehicular and non-motorized traffic must be accounted for in the design of these bridges. The project is intended to increase the service life …

Total Bridge Replacement Of M-13 Over Cheboyganing Creek, Daniel Burns

Honors Theses

The Michigan Department of Transportation sought a proposal consisting of design and construction engineering services for the total bridge replacement of M-13 over Cheboyganing Creek. The M-13 Bridge Project is located on M-13 over Cheboyganing Creek on the Saginaw River in Portsmouth Township, Bay County, Michigan.

Several components of the existing bridge have been rated in poor or serious condition on the National Bridge Inventory rating scale. A total bridge replacement is required and aligns with MDOT strategies to address critical infrastructure needs in the state as well as the Bay Region's five-year plan for managing bridge and culvert infrastructure. …

Safety Benefit Analysis Of Alternative Delineation Practices In Michigan, Brenda C. Burdick

Masters Theses

Among the many aspects of roadway design, one important system is roadway delineation. The main purposes of roadway delineation include regulating, warning, and guiding drivers in a safe manner. Delineation systems have the potential to reduce crashes. This research sought to perform safety benefit analysis of roadway delineation practices in Michigan. Through literature review, several delineation practices, selection criteria, and previously developed crash modification factors were researched. Even though several pavement marking materials have been implemented in Michigan, a safety benefit analysis of various materials had not been performed. Sites were selected, and pavement marking material inventory data were combined …

Application Of Wavelet Transform In Structural Health Monitoring, Yashodhya Swarna Sri Dhanapala Liyana Kankanamge

Masters Theses

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a process of implementing a damage detection strategy in structures to evaluate the condition of existing structures to ensure the safety of users in the future. The changes in the material, geometric and/or structural properties affect structural responses, which can be captured and analyzed for condition assessment. Various vibration-based damage detection algorithms have been developed in the past decades. Among them, the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) gained popularity as an efficient method of signal processing to build a framework to identify model properties and detect damage in structures. In this study, the application of wavelet …

Developing Standard Procedures For Structural Aspects Of Slide-In Bridges In Accelerated Bridge Construction (Abc), Ozan Utku Ridvanoglu

Masters Theses

Slide-in bridge construction (SIBC) is a special method especially used to replace an existing bridge with the minimum duration road closure. In this method, new bridge superstructure is built next to the existing one and it is slid to its final position after demolishing the existing one. Applied implementations of SIBC show that several complications are experienced during bridge slide related with surface interaction. There is a need to evaluate the structural components of SIBC to develop suggestions. In this research, structural components of SIBC were investigated. The research dealt with completed SIBC implementations and numerical modelling of the slide …

Site Development At The Corner Of Drake And Stadium, Ahmad Sear Rahimi

Honors Theses

This report presents the site layout alternatives for the development located at the corner of Drake and Stadium in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In the report four different layouts are suggested and followed by best management practices for grading and earthwork plans, porous asphalt pavement design, storm water retention design for the proposed site, and storm sewer pipe design. The redesign of the Costco Development Site aims to maximize efficiency of the development area through the warehouse and gas station location, parking lot layout, and trucking routes. Grading design is developed based on the existing site conditions before construction took place. The …

Evaluation Of The Safety Effectiveness Of Clearview Font And Fluorescent Yellow Sheeting On Michigan Freeways And Non-Freeways, Lusanni Mercedes Acosta Rodrieuez

Masters Theses

Halation or irradiation makes guide sign fonts difficult to read. Missing the necessary guide sign information causes anxiety and confusion to drivers, and hence may lead to crashes. In order to avoid or mitigate the situation a newer font, Clearview, is used to provide better readability at long distances. In a similar context the lack of brightness in sheeting material for warning signs reduces conspicuity of sings. Installation of fluorescent yellow sheeting has been done to provide signs with more noticeable and brighter materials. This observational before and after study is an evaluation of the safety and economic benefits of …

A Microscopic Simulation Approach To Performance Evaluation Of Intelligent Transportation System Corridors: A Case In Michigan, Matthew Levi Clark

Masters Theses

A cost and benefit evaluation of the Michigan Department of Transportation’s (MDOT) Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is performed through integration of analytical techniques and microscopic traffic microsimulation. Observed freeway corridor incident logs and characteristics are studied to determine representative incident management patterns on choice study corridors. The Quadstone Paramics microsimulation traffic package is used to model the selected corridors during various analysis scenarios and investigate the effects of ITS on freeway incident management performance.