Engineering Commons^™

Laboratory Testing Of Railroad Flatcars For Use As Highway Bridges On Low-Volume Roads To Determine Ultimate Strength And Redundancy, Teresa Lynn Washeleski

Open Access Theses

Railroad flatcars (RRFCs) are a convenient option to replace existing deteriorating bridge structures on low-volume roads. They are typically used as the bridge superstructure by placing two or more flatcars side-by-side to achieve the desired bridge width. Utilizing RRFCs as a bridge allows for rapid construction and greater cost savings compared to traditional practices. These benefits make them an attractive solution for rural communities in Indiana, as well as other states.

Uncertainty remains about the response under higher loads than could be easily achieved in the field and the level of redundancy of railroad flatcar bridges. Using RRFCs as bridges …

An Evaluation Of Spatial Variability Of Water Stress Index Across The United States: Implications Of Supply And Demand In The East Vs The West, Jennifer Ann Roath

Open Access Theses

In order to support both human and environmental needs, high quality fresh water must be available when and where it is required. As a metric for indicating unsustainable water usage, WSI is only useful when the values reflect accurate interactions between supply and demand; however, the complexity of temporal and spatial variability of available fresh water complicates the analysis of water stress.

The overall goal of this project was to investigate the spatial variability of water stress across the United States and the appropriate spatial scale for management decisions. To accomplish this, a national dataset describing spatial distribution and breakdown …

Modeling The Dynamics Of Household-Level Hurricane Evacuation Timing Decisions, Md. Tawfiq Sarwar

Open Access Theses

Frequent occurrences of hurricanes in the coastal areas of the United States in recent times have indicated the necessity of comprehensive evacuation planning. Failure to ensure efficient and timely evacuation causes devastating impacts including loss of lives and property damages. In order to ensure efficient evacuation, emergency officials need to understand how households make evacuation decisions and how their decisions can be influenced. Households' decisions to evacuate/stay, time of departure, route choice and destination choice are four fundamental behavioral issues in the evacuation process. In this thesis, we develop a joint modeling approach for both household-level evacuation decision and departure …

Product Characterization And Headspace Analysis Of Solar Irradiated Aqueous C60 Clusters, Dan Su

Open Access Theses

Buckminsterfullerene (C60) is an important fullerene material that has drawn much attention and is currently being applied in many different fields. It was discovered in 1985. As its production has largely increased to meet these industrial needs, it is obvious that its environmental occurrence, especially in aqueous systems, will occur. To further provide information for environmental toxicity studies and for its risk assessment, this thesis focuses on the photo transformation processes of aqueous C60 clusters (Aqu/nC60), with a particular interest in measuring any mineralization that occurs under different irradiation conditions. Two sets of experiments were conducted to test for CO2 …

Review Of Load Rating And Posting Procedures And Requirements, Raymond Neal Chou

Open Access Theses

All states are required to load rate and post bridges in order to comply with federal standards. Load ratings are performed in order to determine the safe live load capacity of a bridge, considering the existing conditions of the bridge. Based on the load ratings, the bridge is evaluated for load posting or strengthening. The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) was notified that their practice for load rating and posting did not satisfy 23 CFR 650.313, which states that bridges shall be load rated and posted according to an American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) manual. The …

Biomass Production And Hydrological/Water Quality Impacts Of Perennial Crop Production On Marginal Land, Qingyu Feng

Open Access Theses

Marginal land has been proposed to be a viable choice for biomass production to meet the biofuel development goal set by Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA). However, very little information is currently available for quantifying biomass production potential and impacts on hydrology and water quality. The objectives of this study were to: (1) quantify availability of marginal land in a typical agricultural watershed; (2) test whether the biomass feedstock produced from marginal land in the study watershed can support a hypothetical small bio-refinery with annual capacity of 50 million gallons of ethanol produced; and (3) evaluate the hydrological/water quality …

A Framework For Coordinating Water Distribution System And Pavement Infrastructure M&R Based On Lcca, Majed Fedhi Alinizzi

Open Access Theses

The disruptions the public faces daily around the world due to urban infrastructure Maintenance and Rehabilitation (M&R) activities are having significant social, economic, and environment impacts on communities. With respect to water distribution systems, there have been millions of water main breaks in the U.S. since January 2000, with an average of nearly 700 water main breaks every day. The majority of these water utilities lie under paved roads, and the Open Cut method is the most widely used technology for repairing water main breakages. Subsequently, this continually increasing pipe breakage requires the destruction of pavements that may be in …

Size And Rate Effects On Mechanical Behavior Of Ultra High Performance Concrete, Boon Him Lim

Open Access Theses

Cor-Tuf, broadly characterize as a reactive powder concrete is a type of cementitious material. Cementitious materials have been observed to exhibit a strain-rate dependent mechanical behavior. The mechanical behavior of cementitious materials can also depend significantly on specimen sizes. Therefore it is crucial to determine the behavior of Cor-Tuf with different specimen sizes for high-rate applications. For this purpose, split Hopkinson pressure bar (SHPB), also known as Kolsky bar was utilized to determine the dynamic behavior of Cor-Tuf for different specimen sizes under uniaxial dynamic compression loading at different strain rates. It was observed that as strain rate increases the …

Nutrient Recovery From Anaerobically-Digested Dairy Manure By Struvite Formation And Its Effect On Gas Releases, Zhong Qiao

Open Access Theses

Manure management practices such as anaerobic digestion and lagoon storage have become important issues for large dairy farms partially due to water quality and air quality concerns caused by excess nitrogen and phosphorus. Prior research efforts have proven that struvite formation is an effective method for nutrients recovery from both municipal and agricultural wastewaters. However, little is known about nutrient recovery through struvite formation from anaerobically-digested dairy manure effluents.The effects of struvite precipitation on the releases of gases such as NH3, H2S, and CO2 are also unclear.

In this thesis, both bench-scale tests and pilot-scale storage tests were conducted to …

Photochemical Reactions Of Naproxen, Ibuprofen And Tylosin, Yang He

Open Access Theses

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) include a wide range of compounds that are used extensively and sometimes daily by people. Some PPCPs have been detected in surface water (streams, rivers, lakes) due to incomplete removal in wastewater treatment plants. The water contaminated by PPCPs is harmful to aquatic organisms and human. Naproxen (NXP), ibuprofen (IBP) and tylosin (TYL) are chosen as representative PPCPs in the current research, because they are consumed in large quantities throughout the world and there is limited data about photodegradation of these compounds in aqueous solution at the wavelength of 254 nm.

The combination of …

Evaluating Different Bridge Management Strategies Using The Bridge Management Research System (Bmrs), Timothy Paul Stroshine

Open Access Theses

This project investigated the effects of varying two different elements of bridge management strategies. The first element was a trigger value (an NBI condition rating for a bridge component) at which a maintenance treatment can be performed. The second element was the budget.

A new software program, the Bridge Management Research System (BMRS), was created to test these elements of bridge management strategies for Indiana's bridge network. BMRS is a simplified version of a previous bridge management software package developed by Purdue University, the Indiana Bridge Management System (IBMS). To test variations in the trigger values, three different bridge management …