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Sustainability

Theses/Dissertations

2020

Articles 1 - 11 of 11

Full-Text Articles in Civil and Environmental Engineering

Effect Of Citric Acid On Slump, Compressive Strength, And Setting Time Of Belitic Calcium Sulfoaluminate Concrete, Israel Aguilar Rosero Dec 2020

Effect Of Citric Acid On Slump, Compressive Strength, And Setting Time Of Belitic Calcium Sulfoaluminate Concrete, Israel Aguilar Rosero

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Belitic calcium sulfoaluminate (BCSA) cement has well established advantages related to fast setting time, fast strength gain, long-term strengths, shrinkage, and sustainability. Due to its fast setting and hardening, this type of cement has historically been used to repair concrete structures, highways, and runways. This work provides much needed guidance on establishing mix design criteria for BCSA cement. Guidance is also given on the effects of set retarders on strength, slump, and setting times. Citric acid and a phosphonic acid-based admixture were tested as retarders for different concrete mixtures. Three studies were performed. In the slump study five different water …


Sustainability In Construction: Using Lean Management Principles To Reduce Waste, Matthew Waite Dec 2020

Sustainability In Construction: Using Lean Management Principles To Reduce Waste, Matthew Waite

Theses and Dissertations

The construction industry is facing many challenges. There are growing consumer demands for sustainable building. The construction industry generates a significant portion of the waste going into landfills. The construction industry has failed to keep pace with productivity in the manufacturing industry. Through adoption of Lean management principles, the construction industry can become more sustainable while increasing productivity. The literature was evaluated for three concepts: Lean management principles interaction with sustainability, the current state of sustainability in the construction industry, and the current state of Lean management principles in the construction industry. Lean management philosophies interactions with sustainability has been …


Black Lives Matter In Engineering, Too! An Environmental Justice Approach Towards Equitable Decision-Making For Stormwater Management In African American Communities, Maya Elizabeth Carrasquillo Jul 2020

Black Lives Matter In Engineering, Too! An Environmental Justice Approach Towards Equitable Decision-Making For Stormwater Management In African American Communities, Maya Elizabeth Carrasquillo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The United States and the world have recently been challenged with the disparate effects of COVID-19 and the continual killings of unarmed Black men and women across the nation. A history of anti-black racism has led to systemic structures of inequity that thread throughout institutions and communities across the nation. This environmental engineering research comes at a time when understanding how to effectively engage in, and with Black communities is at the forefront of discourse in academia, utilities and private sector.

In 2018 the Brookings Institute published a report on workforce in the water sector demonstrating the lack of diversity …


Numerical And Analytical Methods To Predict Behavior Of Reinforced Ductile Concrete Composites, Mandeep Pokhrel May 2020

Numerical And Analytical Methods To Predict Behavior Of Reinforced Ductile Concrete Composites, Mandeep Pokhrel

Dissertations

Structural components constructed with ductile concrete composites, such as high-performance fiber-reinforced cementitious composites (HPFRCC), are known to perform exceptionally well under extreme mechanical and environmental loading conditions compared to traditional concrete. HPFRCC flexural components exhibit enhanced performance in terms of displacement ductility, energy dissipation capacity, and damage tolerance capacity. However, recent research suggests that the flexural behavior of reinforced HPFRCCs in terms of crack progression, reinforcement plasticity, and failure mechanism is significantly different than conventional reinforced concrete. Specifically, the failure mode of flexural members is found to be predominantly through the fracture of longitudinal reinforcement rather than compression crushing of …


Irrigation Design In Montana: Accommodating Varying Water Accessibility Across The Continental Divide., John Garrett Lampson May 2020

Irrigation Design In Montana: Accommodating Varying Water Accessibility Across The Continental Divide., John Garrett Lampson

Biological and Agricultural Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The design work performed in this project was conducted over two summers (2018, 2019) of internship experience with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) across the state of Montana. The first summer’s design work was based out of Glendive, MT, in Dawson County, approximately 50 kilometers from the North Dakota border. The second summer was in Missoula, MT, in Missoula County, near the Idaho border. The two areas differ significantly in topography, weather, and water availability with the main separating geographic influence being the Rocky Mountains.

This paper focuses on the design process and requirements for two farms located outside …


Water Supply Capacity Development In The Context Of Global Change, Patrick Breach Apr 2020

Water Supply Capacity Development In The Context Of Global Change, Patrick Breach

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The ANEMI model is an integrated assessment model of global change that emphasizes the role of water resources. The model is based on the principles of system dynamics simulation in order to analyze changes in the Earth system using feedback processes. Securing water resources for the future is a key issue of global change, and ties into global systems of population growth, climate change carbon cycle, hydrologic cycle, economy, energy production, land use and pollution generation.

This thesis focusses on the development of global water supplies necessary to keep pace with a growing population and global economy using an integrated …


The Siltcatcher: A Sediment-Capture System For Wetland Creation And Coastal Protection In Western Lake Pontchartrain, Andrew M. Wright Apr 2020

The Siltcatcher: A Sediment-Capture System For Wetland Creation And Coastal Protection In Western Lake Pontchartrain, Andrew M. Wright

LSU Master's Theses

The West Lake Pontchartrain region faces a number of long-term environmental challenges due to anthropogenic climate disturbance and landscape modification, including sea level rise, increased storm surge risk, shoreline erosion, and wetland degradation. In response, this thesis applies recent research in the fields of landscape architecture and civil engineering to propose a dynamic, natural-systems solution for wetland creation and shoreline protection. The project envisions a series of breakwater-like structures in western Lake Pontchartrain positioned to slow water released from the nearby Bonnet Carré Spillway, causing suspended sediment to settle and create self-building and self-sustaining wetlands capable of keeping pace with …


Post-Overlay Flexible Pavement Performance Modeling And Its Application In Sustainable Asphalt Overlay Policy Making, Chunfu Xin Apr 2020

Post-Overlay Flexible Pavement Performance Modeling And Its Application In Sustainable Asphalt Overlay Policy Making, Chunfu Xin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Highway pavement is a critical component of the highway transportation infrastructure. After the construction of a pavement system, pavement condition will deteriorate over time due to a combination effect of material aging, traffic loading, and environmental impact. To restore the pavement performance and to reduce its adverse effects on public users and environment, asphalt overlay activities are conducted frequently during the service life of a pavement. As a key component that bridges the overlay policies with future pavement performance, economic cost and environmental impact, the forecast accuracy of post-overlay pavement performance model is extremely important. However, most of previous studies …


Adapting To Extreme Heat: Social, Atmospheric, And Infrastructure Impacts Of Air Conditioning In Megacities - The Case Of New York City, Harold Gamarro Jan 2020

Adapting To Extreme Heat: Social, Atmospheric, And Infrastructure Impacts Of Air Conditioning In Megacities - The Case Of New York City, Harold Gamarro

Dissertations and Theses

Extreme heat events are becoming more frequent and intense in most large cities. Built-up surfaces also limit cooling mechanisms, leading to warmer conditions in cities, a phenomenon called the Urban Heat Island (UHI). This presents major challenges to reduce adverse health effects of hot weather, particularly in vulnerable populations like the elderly and low-income communities. Here we explore the overall impacts of increasing air conditioning (AC) system adoption in residences as an adaptive measure to reduce human health risks under heat waves, with New York City (NYC) as a case study. This study uses AC adoption data from the 2017 …


Macro - And Microstructure Evaluation And Field Applications Of Concrete With Recycled Glass Pozzolan, Marija Krstic Jan 2020

Macro - And Microstructure Evaluation And Field Applications Of Concrete With Recycled Glass Pozzolan, Marija Krstic

Dissertations and Theses

Concrete is the most used material in the world, second only to water. Conventional concrete is produced with Portland cement (PC). The production of cement is an energy intensive operation that has raised significant environmental concerns, since one ton of cement generates an equal ton of CO2. In the USA about 90 million tons of cement are used annually, with 3 million tons used in New York. Most contemporary concrete applications for buildings and infrastructure use high-performance concrete (HPC) mixtures which are produced by replacing a percentage of cement with supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), consisting mainly of fly-ash …


Seismic Behavior Of Composite Bridge Columns, Mohanad M. Abdulazeez Jan 2020

Seismic Behavior Of Composite Bridge Columns, Mohanad M. Abdulazeez

Doctoral Dissertations

“This study investigates experimentally and numerically the seismic behavior of large-scale hollow-core fiber-reinforced polymer-concrete-steel (HC-FCS) innovative bridge columns as a sustainable approach to endure and rapidly recover from natural disasters such as earthquakes. The HC-FCS column consisted of a concrete shell sandwiched between an outer fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) tube and an inner steel tube to provided continuous confinement for the concrete shell along with the height of the column. The columns have a slender inner steel tube with diameter-to-thickness (Ds/ts) ratios ranged between 85 to 254. Each steel tube was embedded into the footing, while the …