Engineering Commons^™

Pedestrian Bridge For Discovery & Innovation, Matthew Hale, Dylan Stegman, Jake Porter

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

A new pedestrian bridge was designed adjacent to the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose spanning across the Guadalupe River in the Downtown San Jose area. This design includes structural, geotechnical, and construction components. The architectural aspects of the bridge include two intertwined mass timber arches, galvanized steel cables, and a deck consisting of wide flange I-beams and a proprietary structural glass deck system. These features allow the bridge to seamlessly integrate into the surrounding environment as well as expose structural components of a pedestrian bridge that would otherwise be covered by a traditional bridge deck. All disciplinary components of …

Mclaughlin-Walsh Residence Hall Expansion, Rebecca Huang, Shanelle Smith

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

An expansion of McLaughlin-Walsh Residence at Santa Clara University was designed to provide additional housing accommodations to on-campus residents. The design included both the structural and geotechnical components. The proposed solution included a vertical expansion of the residence hall with the design of a podium to span over the existing structure to support an additional residential structure. The loads of the additional residential structure were estimated to complete the design of the podium structure. The podium was designed to support the estimated loads using reinforced concrete columns, steel beams, prefabricated trusses, and concrete on metal deck. The podium design was …

Sustainable, Environmental Transit Hub (Seth) In Kapolei, Hawai‘I, Rebecca Ridao, Azi Nigmatullin, Andrew Ruiz, Matthew Flores

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

In this report, a detailed design of a Sustainable, Environmental Transit Hub is provided that has the potential to mitigate the overbearing traffic congestion problem on the primary highways of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. The report will consist of a brief description on why the team considered reviewing this issue with an explanation of the problem statement followed by an alternative analysis breakdown, constraints and criteria list, chosen solution with the inclusion of the location, the team’s respective scopes of work, codes and regulations that were followed, ethical considerations, design specifications, and references that were used for information. The primary scopes that …

Sustainable Design Of Reinforced Concrete Beam, Justin Lei, Alyssa Quezada, Juan Ramirez-Daza

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The need for sustainable methods of construction is continuously rising as heavily populated areas are growing in size and the demand for new construction is expanding. This project aims to identify typical environmental damages associated with the construction of a typical mixed-use building in San Jose, CA, specifically the emissions of greenhouse gasses; carbon dioxide. The project also aims to meet current design standards and requirements set by the American Concrete Institution and the California Building Code to ensure the safety of all users. Lastly, to ensure the design can be implemented in the field, a cost analysis of the …

South Lake Tahoe Fire Resiliency Project, Kelsi Rice, Wyatt Rich

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Our names are Kelsi Rice and Wyatt Rich. We are Seniors at Santa Clara University and are majoring in Civil, Sustainable and Environmental Engineering. Within our senior year at Santa Clara, it is a requirement that we complete a Senior Design Project. Our Senior Design Project is fire hardening the City of South Lake Tahoe’s (City) utility lines. The last few months we have been analyzing the City's current utility infrastructure and the potential for new utility services to be implemented throughout the City. We have conducted an alternatives analysis to determine that the City of South Lake Tahoe is …

New Braunfels Stormwater Park, Glen Falconio, Judah Foster, Teagan Moore

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Comal County, located in a region in Texas inundated by a high frequency of floods, has faced over $272 million in flood damages to properties and crops. The largest urban area in the county, New Braunfels has made efforts to increase the quantity of flood mitigation practices in the city through weir construction, stormwater runoff control requirements, and new drainage proposals. Still, there are older parts of the city lacking stormwater management projects. A stormwater park serving the region along the Dry Comal Creek has been conceptualized to manage stormwater, increase water quality in the creek, and provide recreational value …

Supetai Well Filtration System, Nicholas Holtz, Shirley Naranjo, Eduardo Villegas

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The rural, Maasai community of Ewaso Ngiro lacks a dependable source of clean drinking water. Their well, Supetai Well, pumps out groundwater that has high amounts of fluoride making it unsafe to consume. The team worked with a local kenyan water and power company, Davis & Shirtliff, to design a reverse osmosis system that will remove all contaminants, including fluoride. The reverse osmosis system takes into consideration current water demand and future population growth. The system will include pre-treatment, reverse osmosis membranes, and post treatment. This system will be powered by solar panels. The team will provide a final report …

Finn Hall Community Spaces Redesign, Kaan Euchukanonchai, Kevin Liang, Niko Lopez

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Carbon emissions negatively impact the environment through climate change, air pollution, and rising sea levels, among many other factors. One large contributor to carbon emissions is industrialization, more specifically, the building sector. Based on Architecture 2030, a non-governmental organization whose primary mission is to build an environment free from carbon emissions, building operations and the construction industry contribute to 40% of carbon emissions (Architecture 2030). As more buildings are being constructed, the need for reducing carbon emissions increases. This senior design project looked at Finn Residence Hall, a dormitory on the premises of Santa Clara University. The current design of …

Highway 17 Wildlife Crossing, Taryn Chisholm, Seema Singh, Justin Uyeno

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Highway 17 is an essential corridor for people to commute between the Bay Area and the Santa Cruz regions, but this highway also creates a barrier between wildlife territories, fragmenting their habitats and stranding animal populations on either side. The lack of crossing infrastructure along Highway 17 forces wildlife to attempt to cross the highway into oncoming traffic, causing wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC) which endangers the lives of motorists and animals alike. In order to address this problem, the team designed a precast, concrete culvert crossing underneath Highway 17 to provide a safer passageway to increase habitat connectivity as well as …

Supetai Well Water Purification, Claire Russon, Geovanni Usher, Nicole Valdivia

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The rural Kenyan community of Oldonya Rasha had depended on water from a distant spring of unknown quality from which there have been reports of typhoid. A non-governmental organization, Sabore’s Well, built the centrally-located Supetai Well with the intention of solving the lack of accessible potable water, but due to high fluoride levels in the groundwater, this water source is unsafe. The team designed a water treatment system to be integrated into the existing well infrastructure that removes fluoride and pathogens to meet Kenyan and World Health Organization (WHO) water quality standards. The design includes dosage of alum and soda …

Home Ranch - A Single Family Residential Development In Gilroy, Ca, Patrick Hagerty, Luke Lazzarini

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Project Overview

The purpose of this project was to provide a housing development plan for an undeveloped plot in the South Gilroy area.

Project Statement

The City of Gilroy needs additional housing to support the growth of their community. This project seeks to determine the best use of the undeveloped McCutchin Creek subplot and design its site layout. This plot of land is constrained by the City development codes, the 2023 City of Gilroy housing element, and the site specific development code.

The deliverables presented to the client are a grading plan, site layout plan, stormwater and sewage plan, potable …

Water Storage Analysis And Design Portfolio For Nocaima, Colombia, Philip Bortz, Lola Martin Uribe, Claudia Newell, Gisselle Paz-Ortiz

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

In partnership with Santa Clara University Frugal Innovation Hub and the Institución Universitaria of Politécnico Grancolombiano, the project aims to provide a single household, self-managed, water storage solution for residents of rural Nocaima, Colombia. Currently, the impacts of climate change and the lack of a sufficient community water system threaten the water security of rural Nocaima and the livelihoods of its residents. Proposed are two rainwater collection and storage systems, one including slow sand filtration and tank storage system, and the other a retention pond that will not be filtered. Components of the solutions include collection, storage, and filtration systems, …

Saint Joseph Hall Retrofit, Jordan Masutomi, Martin Duran

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Santa Clara University has always strived to create a healthy and safe learning environment for students and faculty. The curriculum taught at the University empowers students, faculty, and staff to build a more humane, just, and safe world. With safety at the forefront of engineering ethics it is imperative that this is not only taught in our classrooms but also showcased in our campus infrastructure. Our project seeks to conduct a seismic retrofit for Saint Joseph Hall, a building that has served the Bronco community for over 100 years. In this paper we will discuss our investigation of old campus …

Emergency Relief Structure For Natural Disaster Evacuees And The Homeless Population, Madeline Yee, Margaret Tolan, Rodrigo Mendez

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

In California, many communities lack the resources to provide support for natural disaster evacuees and those devastated by economic loss (our growing homeless community). An improved interim housing solution needs to be developed - a solution that provides comfort, privacy, and community - in the hopes of maintaining the dignity of those experiencing these hardships. In order to address this problem, the team designed a modular, panelized structure to provide shelter to those who are subject to emergency situations. A structural design and analysis was completed for both a cold-formed steel and a timber structure. A parcel of land in …

Addressing Water Inequality In Rural California: East Orosi Clean Water Initiative, Julia Carroll, Peter Naughton, Trey Novara

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The California water crisis has left over one-million residents without potable water. This crisis is due to a multitude of issues: climate change, drought, groundwater overdraft and groundwater contamination. This technical report reviews solutions to the implications of groundwater well contamination. Pollutants contaminate aquifers, affecting small rural communities; one such location is East Orosi, Tulare County, California, a community of 700 people. The community’s only water source is a nitrate-contaminated well. Contamination can be lethal, and a solution to provide the region with potable water is necessary. This technical report summarizes a broad scope of solutions that East Orosi can …

Seedling Irrigation Design For Valley Verde, Sarah Dao, Sally Ferguson, Hope Laborin

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

A new irrigation and drainage system was designed and implemented for the non-profit organization Valley Verde located in downtown San Jose. The design incorporated an existing irrigation piping system installed by Valley Verde in winter 2020 and included new structural and electrical components to make the system automated and recirculating. The new structural components were easily replicable Douglas fir tables with reflective film that mitigate heat transfer to plants situated on top. The recirculating component consisted of a submersible pump, PVC tubing, a reservoir, and an underhanging attached PVC pipe that redirects water to reservoirs. The electrical components included humidity …

Suburban Tiny Home Development, Colin Wood, Paul Carr, Chris Wang

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

This project aimed to capitalize on a future trend in housing that allows for new sustainable housing solutions. Due to advancements in the virtual workplace catalyzed by COVID-19, virtual work and virtual work platforms have been normalized, allowing people who live in cities greater flexibility in where they choose to live. Many companies, including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, have implied that they will likely keep remote work as an option indefinitely, allowing for increased flexibility in workers’ living situations. This change allows for employees to venture outside of the city to suburbs or even rural areas. The goal of this …

Potable Water For A Volcanic Community In Rural Guatemala, Marieli Rubio, Jichan Seo, Connor Thomas

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The project, in partnership with Santa Clara University Frugal Innovation Hub and Instituto de Investigacion y Proyeccion sobre Ciencia y Tecnologia (INCYT) at Universidad Rafael Landivar, aimed to provide Panimache II, a small volcanic Guatemalan community, with access to clean and affordable water. The team designed a water treatment plant and distribution system, consisting of a hydraulic flocculator, sedimentation basin, slow-sand filter, and chlorination chamber, to remove the high levels of ash and other suspended solids. Components of the project included analyzing water source and quality, availability of construction materials, and recommended construction to effectively design and implement the community's …

Design Of Cultural Preservation Center For The Nez Perce Tribe, Catherine Moore, Carolina Avelar, Rodolfo Leon

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The Cultural Preservation Program of the Nez Perce tribe centered in Lapwai , Idaho is growing and in need of additional space to house its many programs. Due to this need , the team considered several alternative solutions to provide necessary space for the Cultural Resource Program to continue growing , while maintaining the several programs it currently oversees. Alternative designs considered include the renovation of existing buildings near the current Cultural Resource Program , the use of historical structures within the reservation and the building of a new structure or structures to house the Cultural Resource Program. The final …

Climate Change Analysis And Stream Restoration In The Upper Truckee River Basin, Nicholas Szigeti, Christian Raslowsky

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The Upper Truckee River (UTR) Basin is the largest watershed that drains into Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. Channelization and degradation of historic floodplains have caused fine sediment particles to erode from river banks and reduce the clarity of Lake Tahoe. In addition, as climate change worsens, it is expected that the hydrology of the region will not adhere to historical trends. To help solve these issues a climate analysis was conducted for a watershed near the UTR using four global climate models (due to lack of data availability and resources), and a scoured reach of the …

California High Speed Rail Central Valley Realignment, Jossian Pineda, Devin Schmidt

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The California High-Speed Rail in California has exceeded its budget and proven that typical methods of laying out High-Speed Rail were inefficient and detrimental to residents. By analyzing routes where the High-Speed Rail could instead be routed through medians or dead space around existing freeways, the project team determined the feasibility and cost efficiency of such an undertaking. The team analyzed multiple routes and upon choosing the best route, completed a curve analysis on a portion of the alignment, as well as completed an analysis on typical bridges that would be required. The analysis proved that utilizing this median space …

Hester Gardens - A Lifemoves Temporary Interim-Housing Facility, Jeffrey Meier, Megan Sauter, Jenna Tran, Taylor Klauser

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

LifeMoves, an organization that provides interim housing and supportive services to families and individuals experiencing homelessness, recently purchased 0.35 acres of land, located at 1759 Hester Avenue, San Jose, CA 95128. LifeMoves has challenged the design team to provide preliminary building layouts, a structural alternative analysis, construction management plans, and general civil plans for a multi-story, family-friendly, interim housing facility, which has been named Hester Gardens. The design team considered both steel, a traditional building material, and shipping containers, a sustainable alternative building material, for this project. Each alternative included a structural design and analysis, as well as a cost …

Scu Faculty & Staff Housing Development, Ayo Ogunfunmi, Deirdre Bonitz, Rachael Han, Spencer Saito

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Due to the high housing costs in the Bay Area, Santa Clara University’s (SCU) faculty and staff have to live further away from campus where the housing market is more affordable, ultimately increasing their commute time and increasing the environmental impact due to transportation. Therefore, SCU has expressed the need to provide affordable housing for their faculty and staff who do not earn enough income to be able to live in the City of San Jose or County of Santa Clara. The project proposed in this report represents the efforts of SCU Civil Engineering students to adhere towards the social, …

Design Of A Denitrification Bioreactor For St. Francis Retreat Center, Monique Hansen, Ashton Politz

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The St. Francis Retreat Center located in San Juan Bautista, California has over 7000 visitors a year. The Retreat Center aims to provide a peaceful rejuvenating experience for its visitors through the opportunity to enjoy the natural beauty and landscape it has to offer. Unfortunately, the Retreat Center has a lake on its property that, primarily during the summer months, is dry due to the lack of rain. In effort to solve this problem and make the property more visually appealing, the Retreat Center would like to use the water from a well to recharge the lake. The well, however, …

Groundwater Irrigation System For Sustainable Agriculture, Peter Koros, Richard Matthews, Ciara Murphy

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The aim of this project was to develop a prototype that may be a model to help relieve food insecurity in rural Liberia. This was accomplished by designing a groundwater extraction, recharge, and irrigation system to facilitate year-long crop-growth. The project was in partnership with BRAID Africa and a community in Zwedru, located in east Liberia, near the border of Côte D’Ivoire. During 2010 and 2011, a civil war broke out in Côte D’Ivoire and led to the citizens of the country taking refuge in Liberia (Leaf 2015). Many refugees have decided to stay in Liberia and are struggling to …

Design Of Sustainable Mixed Use Complex In Santa Clara, California, Spencer Larsen, Joao Etrusco, Marek Kossik

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Lying in the heart of the Silicon Valley, the City of Santa Clara is a hotbed of development and has long been viewed as the model for rapid development, as the area needs to keep up with the demands of the rapidly growing technology industry. For this senior design project, the team decided to address this issue of massive urban growth by proposing a development design that is both sustainable and establishes a community feel that enhances local growth and business. The team drew initial inspiration from San Jose based The CORE Companies’ Agrihood project, a community development already in …

Tiny Home Innovations: Alternative Uses And Designs With The San José Bridge Housing Community, Jackson Bordelon, John O’Hagan

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Homelessness is without question one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the Bay Area. Regardless of whether people think ending homelessness is feasible, the bottom line is that every human deserves the right to have a place they call home. Despite the simplicity of this right, achieving it in today’s society is difficult because of the economic, social and political complexities which make homelessness appear to be a problem with no solution. Unfortunately, belief in the hopelessness of efforts to end homelessness dissuades many from taking action.

This project is not guided by the belief that ending homelessness is …

Complete Streets In Venice, California, Fabian Chavez, Jordan Cho

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

In response to the growing pattern of fatal traffic accidents involving pedestrians and bicyclists in the City of Los Angeles, a new initiative has been started to reduce these accidents by improving current designs and adding signage and striping to add more visibility. The city-wide project also focused on these redesigns to help boost the surrounding economy by encouraging residents to bike and walk instead of drive. Though met with much criticism and protest from residents, the traffic data after one year of the pilot implementation proved accident rates and fatalities had decreased with the new safety measures installed. This …

Analysis And Redesign Of I-680 And Mission Boulevard Interchange, Melissa Elian-Carrillo

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

The existing four cloverleaf design of the I-680 Mission Boulevard Interchange in Fremont, California, was analyzed at merge, diverge, basic, and weaving freeway segments. After the traffic analysis of all the segments, the critical segment for redesign was the merge segment of I-680 South to Mission Boulevard westbound, due to a failing Level of Service. Over a span of 17 years (2018-2035) a comparison of the current condition and the redesign was executed for crashes, congestion, air pollution, noise, greenhouse gases, and required road facilities and traffic services. The construction costs of the redesign as well as aesthetic, health, disaster …

Analysis Of Structural Components During Cyclical Loading Of Steel Reinforced Earthbag Construction, Noah Strong, Emil Huebner, Ethan Jensen

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Senior Theses

Testing for structural properties of earthbag construction was completed using a pilot method for coupling reinforcing steel in mid-height concrete boxes in earthbag walls. Benefits of earthbag wall construction include use of alternative building materials, frugal cost, and ease of construction. The goal of the project was to establish predictable structural standards for eventual inclusion in residential building code(s). Earthbag walls were designed for a 1.5:1 aspect ratio standing at four feet (4’) wide and six feet (6’) tall. Two walls with an innovative concrete coupler connection were constructed over the course of five days and left to dry for …