Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Evaluation Of The Geotechnical And Foundation Components On Jud Site, Mirabel W. Nkanor

Honors Theses

This thesis is part of the senior design final project of the Civil Engineering Department at the University of Mississippi. Geotechnical and foundation analyses were done on a proposed construction project for a multi-family home in Orlando, Florida. This evaluation done in this thesis follows the pre-existing geotechnical report on the side, USDA soil reports, ASCE Code 32-01 (Design of Foundations), and ASCE-7 Section 12.31.1 (Foundations and Superstructure-to-Foundation Connections).

A structural system was selected from the proposed location, on the corner of South Conway and Judge Road, and an evaluation of the Bearing Load capacity was completed to determine the …

An Investigation Into The Common Problems Of Lagoon Wastewater Treatment In Kentucky, Kaylee A. Jones

Honors Theses

Lagoon wastewater treatment systems are commonly used in areas that do not have the available resources for typical mechanical wastewater treatment. Lagoon systems consist of multiple preliminary lagoons, but mainly rely on long-term facultative lagoons for most analyte removal. In this study, one particular lagoon wastewater treatment system (named Municipality A Wastewater Treatment Plant) is investigated due to noncompliance with governmental standards provided by the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). Samples were collected by researchers at 4 different instances inside of the treatment systems. These samples were sent to an analytical laboratory for testing. The readings from these samples …

Effects Of Feeding Mode On The Performance, Life Span And Greenhouse Gas Emissions Of A Vertical Flow Macrophyte Assisted Vermifilter, Rajneesh Singh, Chittaranjan Ray, Daniel N. Miller, Lisa M. Durso, Yulie Meneses, Shannon Bartelt-Hunt, Matteo D’Alessio

Faculty and Student Publications

This study was conducted to investigate the impact of intermittent feeding on performance, clogging, and gaseous emission on macrophyte assisted vermifiltration (MAVF) based treatment system. Synthetic slaughterhouse wastewater was applied to two different integrated vertical flow based MAVFs. Triplicates were used throughout the study. Eisenia fetida earthworms were added to MAVFs, and Carex muskingmenis plants were planted. Wastewater was applied to the reactors on 1) intermittent (8 h/day) (IMAVF) and 2) continuous (24 h/day) (CMAVF) basis. The average chemical oxygen demand, total nitrogen, and total phosphorous removals achieved by the IMAVF were 80.2 ± 1.6%, 53.9 ± 1.3% and 66.5 …

Evaluating Pedestrian Service Of The New Super Diverging Diamond Interchange On Three Case Study Sites In Denver, Colorado, Muhammad Tahmidul Haq, Amirarsalan Mehrara Molan, Khaled Ksaibati

Faculty and Student Publications

Ensuring safe and comfortable conditions for pedestrians necessitates specific strategies at intersections and service interchanges where traffic and pedestrians interact in complex ways with other modes of transportation. This study aims to investigate pedestrian performance at the new Super Diverging Diamond Interchange (Super DDI) using real-world locations (i.e., I-225 and Mississippi Ave, I-25 and 120th Ave, and I-25 and Hampden Ave in Denver, Colorado). Three alternative designs, typical DDI, and two versions of Super DDI were considered to make a reasonable comparison with the existing Conventional Diamond Interchange (CDI). A comprehensive series of simulation models (192 scenarios with 960 runs) …

Evaluating Groundwater Storage Change And Recharge Using Grace Data: A Case Study Of Aquifers In Niger, West Africa, Sergio A. Barbosa, Sarva T. Pulla, Gustavious P. Williams, Norman L. Jones, Bako Mamane, Jorge L. Sanchez

Faculty and Student Publications

Accurately assessing groundwater storage changes in Niger is critical for long-term water resource management but is difficult due to sparse field data. We present a study of groundwater storage changes and recharge in Southern Niger, computed using data from NASA Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission. We compute a groundwater storage anomaly estimate by subtracting the surface water anomaly provided by the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) model from the GRACE total water storage anomaly. We use a statistical model to fill gaps in the GRACE data. We analyze the time period from 2002 to 2021, which corresponds …

A Framework For Estimating Future Traffic Operation And Safety Performance Of Restricted Crossing U-Turn (Rcut) Intersections, Amirarsalan M. Molan, Jonathan Howard, Mouyid Islam, Anurag Pande

Faculty and Student Publications

Background: Despite numerous studies demonstrating the effectiveness of Restricted Crossing U-Turn (RCUT) intersection design, its implementation remains uneven and close to zero in some large states, including California. This paper provides a comprehensive framework to estimate the operational and safety performance of future RCUT designs. The framework is demonstrated for a geometrically constrained intersection located on a highspeed rural expressway. The operational evaluation relies on microscopic simulation models of existing TWSC and alternate RCUT designs used to estimate network-wide performance measures. Methods: Two approaches are demonstrated for future safety estimation; first, an HSM-prescribed Empirical Bayes (EB) approach that uses Safety …

Application Of Artificial Neural Network To Predict The Properties Of Permeable Concrete, Hatem H. Almasaeid, Donia G. Salman

Faculty and Student Publications

The structure of permeable concrete has been the primary reason for its use in construction. Permeable concrete is composed of water, cement, aggregate, and little-to no-fines resulting in the presence of a significant number of voids. This makes permeable concrete an ideal solution to water accumulation issues as it acts as a drainage system. This study employs a feedforward backpropagation artificial neural network model that combines experimental laboratory data from previous studies with appropriate network architectures and training techniques. The purpose of the analysis is to develop a reliable functional relationship, based on water-cement ratio, aggregate-cement ratio, and density parameters, …

Metasurface Cloaks To Decouple Closely Spaced Printed Dipole Antenna Arrays Fed By A Microstrip-To-Balanced Transmission-Line Transition, Doojin Lee, Alexander B. Yakovlev

Faculty and Student Publications

In this work, we present a numerical study of 1D and 2D closely spaced antenna arrays of microstrip dipole antennas covered by a metasurface in order to properly cloak and decouple the antenna arrays operating at neighboring frequencies. We show that the two strongly coupled arrays fed by a microstrip-to-balanced transmission-line transition are effectively decoupled in 1D and 2D array scenarios by covering the dipole antenna elements with an elliptically shaped metasurface. The metasurface comprises sub-wavelength periodic metallic strips printed on an elliptically shaped dielectric cover around the dipole antennas and integrated with the substrate. We present a practical design …

Evaluating The Effect Of City Ordinances On The Implementation And Performance Of Green Stormwater Infrastructure (Gsi), Liya E. Abera, Cristiane Q. Surbeck, Kristina Alexander

Faculty and Student Publications

The replacement of natural pervious surfaces with impervious surfaces due to urbanization, construction, and development causes excess stormwater runoff and results in cities experiencing localized flooding events. The installation of green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) is one way of reducing flooding events and preventing downstream erosion and damage. In this study, computer rainfall-runoff simulations were performed to analyze GSI's effectiveness in mitigating stormwater runoff when applied to sites with different soil types and for which different design storms were established by regulation. A mixed-use development site was used as a hypothetical site on which to perform the analysis. The study applied …

Microscopic Traffic Simulation As A Decision Support System For Road Diet And Tactical Urbanism Strategies, Bernice Liu, Amirarsalan Mehrara Molan, Anurag Pande, Jonathan Howard, Serena Alexander, Zhiliang Lou

Faculty and Student Publications

Urban street networks in the United States have been primarily designed for automobile traffic with negligible considerations to non-motorized transportation users. Due to environmental issues and quality of life concerns, communities are reclaiming street spaces for active modes and slowing the speeds in their downtown. Moreover, tactical urbanism, i.e., the use of street space for innovative purposes other than moving automobile traffic, is becoming attractive due to reduced automobile travel demand and the need for outdoor activities in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study provides details of the modeling of an urban downtown network (in the City of …

Design Of Load Bearing Wall For Low Rise Building With Partially Grouted Reinforced Masonry, Anil Bhatt

Honors Theses

The seismic and wind load acting on the 2-storeyed building of dimension 120 ft x 98 ft located in Oxford, MS, were calculated and the seismic load was considered for the design of the 120 ft long and 24 ft high load-bearing wall because it being critical. The maximum loading was computed using different load combinations. The masonry behavior and masonry specifications were considered to select the masonry unit, grout, and mortar for the load-bearing wall. The seismic design requirement for the shear and slender wall was fulfilled for the special reinforced masonry wall. The in-plane and out-of-plane loading scenarios …

Evaluating The Effects Of Seismic Loading On Concrete Reinforced Versus Precast Concrete Slab Floor Systems, Mahima Maharjan

Honors Theses

This thesis is part of the senior design capstone project of Ole Miss Department of Civil Engineering. The seismic loadings for the commercial buildings project located in Oxford, Mississippi are evaluated to fulfill the honor thesis requirement. This thesis follows the codes from American Concrete Institute (ACI), International Building Code (IBC), and ASCE-7/SEI (Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Buildings and Other Structures/Structural Engineering Institute) to design the gravitational loadings and seismic loadings.

Furthermore, a reinforced concrete slab flooring system is replaced with a precast slab flooring system to analyze the most seismic performance effective floor system for the …

Going Green: A Comparative Analysis Of Green Urbanism In Paris And Shanghai, Jeanne Torp

Honors Theses

As climate change becomes more pressing with each day and as we scramble to slow down the challenges it poses, adapting the means of operation within our cities will become an invaluable tool for reducing humanity’s carbon footprint. This paper seeks to study the ways in which green infrastructure in global cities can be used to do just that—adapting to and mitigating the effects of challenges resulting from climate change. In order to provide a broad overview of the effectiveness of such green infrastructure systems across the globe, this research will focus on two cities that vary greatly in their …

Forecasting Geotechnical Parameters From Electrical Resistivity And Seismic Wave Velocities Using Artificial Neural Network Models, Fatema Tuz Johora

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Geotechnical measurements of soil parameters used in the design of infrastructure provide information at a specific point of the ground. The use of limited point data may result in greater uncertainty and less reliability in design. Geophysical methods are non-invasive, less time-consuming, and provide continuous spatial information about the soil. However, geophysical information is not in terms of engineering parameters. Correlations between geotechnical parameters and geophysical parameters are needed to facilitate the use of geophysical information in geotechnical designs. The current research is focused on two geophysical methods; electrical resistivity (ER) and seismic wave velocity (S-wave and P-wave). Artificial neural …

Computational Modeling Of Climate Attributes And Condition Deterioration Of Concrete Highway Pavements, Salma Sultana

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An efficient and safe road network secures the nation’s economy and prosperity by providing public mobility and freight transport. Maintenance and rehabilitation of the road network cost billions of dollars annually. Road and highway infrastructures performance in any country is impacted by load repetitions and it is further compromised by climate attributes and extreme weather events. Damages to roads and bridges are among the infrastructure failures that have occurred during these extreme events. If maintenance and rehabilitation are not done promptly, the damages to the road caused by heavy traffic and extreme climate may lead to life-threatening conditions for road …

Effectiveness Of Seismic Bearings On A Typical Isolated Two-Column Rc Bridge Pier Located In North Mississippi, Hemant Raj Joshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The 2020 ASCE infrastructure report card has assigned a letter grade of D- for bridges in Mississippi based on poor to fair condition ratings with many approaching the end of their useful service lives. Bridges in northern Mississippi lie up to 100 miles from the New Madrid Fault and fall into the Region 3 Seismic Performance Category defined by AASHTO. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of commercially available bridge bearings on a common bridge pier type used in northern MS under the combined action of superstructure gravity and lateral seismic loads. The use of …

Electromagnetic Survey Design Using Artifical Neural Networks, Shariful Islam Sharif

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Acquiring geophysical information requires selection of the geophysical method based upon the defining physical property and a survey design with adequate resolution but cost effective based upon the size of the area to be surveyed. The objective of this study is to use artificial neural nets (ANNs) to design an optimal survey. The developed approach is tested for the case of soil pipe surveying using electromagnetics. Soil pipes are tortuous voids located within 1.5 m depth of the ground surface. They trend perpendicular to the slope and have cross-sectional dimensions on the order of millimeters to tens of centimeters. The …

Wetting-Driven Formation Of Present-Day Loess Structure, Yanrong Li, Weiwei Zhang, Shengdi He, Adnan Aydin

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2020 The Authors Present-day loess, especially Malan loess formed in Later Quaternary, has a characteristic structure composed of vertically aligned strong units and weak segments. Hypotheses describing how this structure forms inside original loess deposits commonly relate it to wetting-drying process. We tested this causal relationship by conducting unique experiments on synthetic samples of initial loess deposits fabricated by free-fall of loess particles. These samples were subjected to a wetting-drying cycle, and their structural evolutions were documented by close-up photography and CT scanning. Analysis of these records revealed three key stages of structural evolution: initiation (evenly distributed cracks appear …

A Mathematical Framework For Estimating Risk Of Airborne Transmission Of Covid-19 With Application To Face Mask Use And Social Distancing, Rajat Mittal, Charles Meneveau, Wen Wu

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2020 Author(s). A mathematical model for estimating the risk of airborne transmission of a respiratory infection such as COVID-19 is presented. The model employs basic concepts from fluid dynamics and incorporates the known scope of factors involved in the airborne transmission of such diseases. Simplicity in the mathematical form of the model is by design so that it can serve not only as a common basis for scientific inquiry across disciplinary boundaries but it can also be understandable by a broad audience outside science and academia. The caveats and limitations of the model are discussed in detail. The model …

Lead In Drinking Water And The Effectiveness Of Point-Of-Use Filtration, Donald Hopper

Honors Theses

Lead in drinking water has been proven harmful to human health and is an ongoing problem in the state of Mississippi. The goal of this thesis is to analyze lead contamination data in Mississippi, its implications, and possible short-term solutions for remediation. This was done through community outreach events and voluntary sampling in the Jackson, MS area, analyzing published data from the Mississippi State Department of Health, and conducting controlled sampling and testing in Lafayette County, MS.

Community engagement events were executed in which researchers informed citizens in the Jackson, MS area about the impacts of lead in drinking water …

Analysis Of Technical And Cost Barriers For Implementation Of Green Infrastructure, Liya Abera

Graduate Student Council Research Grants

Overview: My name is Liya E. Abera, a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil Engineering. I am applying for the GSC grant to obtain a hydrological modeling software, HydroCAD, to use in my research for stormwater rainfall-runoff analyses.

Intellectual Merit: Stormwater runoff occurs when rainwater flows over the ground. Increase in impervious landcover due to urbanization and land development causes excess stormwater runoff that causes flooding events. Floods can be hazardous to communities by damaging properties and exposing them to contaminated water. Installation of Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) is one sustainable way of reducing flooding events and …

Load-Balancing Rendezvous Approach For Mobility-Enabled Adaptive Energy-Efficient Data Collection In Wsns, Jian Zhang, Jian Tang, Zhonghui Wang, Feng Wang, Gang Yu

Faculty and Student Publications

Copyright © 2020 KSII The tradeoff between energy conservation and traffic balancing is a dilemma problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). By analyzing the intrinsic relationship between cluster properties and long distance transmission energy consumption, we characterize three node sets of the cluster as a theoretical foundation to enhance high performance of WSNs, and propose optimal solutions by introducing rendezvous and Mobile Elements (MEs) to optimize energy consumption for prolonging the lifetime of WSNs. First, we exploit an approximate method based on the transmission distance from the different node to an ME to select suboptimal Rendezvous Point (RP) on the …

Revisiting Lightweight Encryption For Iot Applications: Error Performance And Throughput In Wireless Fading Channels With And Without Coding, Yazid M. Khattabi, Mustafa M. Matalgah, Mohammed M. Olama

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2013 IEEE. Employing heavy conventional encryption algorithms in communications suffers from added overhead and processing time delay; and in wireless communications, in particular, suffers from severe performance deterioration (avalanche effect) due to fading. Consequently, a tremendous reduction in data throughput and increase in complexity and time delay may occur especially when information traverse resource-limited devices as in Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. To overcome these drawbacks, efficient lightweight encryption algorithms have been recently proposed in literature. One of those, that is of particular interest, requires using conventional encryption only for the first block of data in a given frame being transmitted. …

Cooperative Relay Selection For Load Balancing With Mobility In Hierarchical Wsns: A Multi-Armed Bandit Approach, Jian Zhang, Jian Tang, Feng Wang

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2013 IEEE. Energy efficiency is the major concern in hierarchical wireless sensor networks(WSNs), where the major energy consumption originates from radios for communication. Due to notable energy expenditure of long-range transmission for cluster members and data aggregation for Cluster Head (CH), saving and balancing energy consumption is a tricky challenge in WSNs. In this paper, we design a CH selection mechanism with a mobile sink (MS) while proposing relay selection algorithms with multi-user multi-armed bandit (UM-MAB) to solve the problem of energy efficiency. According to the definition of node density and residual energy, we propose a conception referred to …

Timcc: On Data Freshness In Privacy-Preserving Incentive Mechanism Design For Continuous Crowdsensing Using Reverse Auction, Xiaoqiang Ma, Weiwei Deng, Feng Wang, Menglan Hu, Fei Chen, Mohammad Mehedi Hassan

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2013 IEEE. As an emerging paradigm that leverages the wisdom and efforts of the crowd, mobile crowdsensing has shown its great potential to collect distributed data. The crowd may incur such costs and risks as energy consumption, memory consumption, and privacy leakage when performing various tasks, so they may not be willing to participate in crowdsensing tasks unless they are well-paid. Hence, a proper privacy-preserving incentive mechanism is of great significance to motivate users to join, which has attracted a lot of research efforts. Most of the existing works regard tasks as one-shot tasks, which may not work very …

The Critical Difference Seismic Design Can Make For A Reinforced Concrete Building Located In Oxford, Mississippi, Naim Daghmash

Honors Theses

The Senior Design course at the University of Mississippi requires the completion of a capstone project. One part of the capstone project is a complete structural design of the NOLA, an ongoing construction in the city of Oxford in Mississippi. The course requires the NOLA to be designed according to gravity loads, meaning the forces act in the downward direction towards the earth’s surface. Some loading mechanisms that could occur in a different direction than gravity are seismic loads, which are earthquake-generated loads. I was not required by my instructors to consider the effect of an earthquake on the structural …

How Moisture Content Levels And Packing Density In Soil Affect Crude Oil Spreads, Shaylin N. Williams

Venture: The University of Mississippi Undergraduate Research Journal

Crude oil spills are one of the most destructive disasters that can occur, and they are extremely difficult to recover from. Many studies focus on what can be done to clean these crude oil spills, but more research should be focused on means of prevention. Currently, very little is known about how the moisture content levels and the packing efficiency of soil can affect an oil spill. These two factors alone can offer a variety of information to environmental agencies, manufacturers, and refineries. Through utilization of a chemical engineering lab, a recording mechanism, and ImagePro software, data was collected and …

Ole Miss Engineer 2019

Ole Miss Engineer

No abstract provided.

Urea Functionalization Of Ultrasound-Treated Biochar: A Feasible Strategy For Enhancing Heavy Metal Adsorption Capacity, Baharak Sajjadi, James William Broome, Wei Yin Chen, Daniell L. Mattern, Nosa O. Egiebor, Nathan Hammer, Cameron L. Smith

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. The main objective of a series of our researches is to develop a novel acoustic-based method for activation of biochar. This study investigates the capability of biochar in adsorbing Ni(II) as a hazardous contaminant and aims at enhancing its adsorption capacity by the addition of extra nitrogen and most probably phosphorous and oxygen containing sites using an ultrasono-chemical modification mechanism. To reach this objective, biochar physically modified by low-frequency ultrasound waves (USB) was chemically treated by phosphoric acid (H3PO4) and then functionalized by urea (CO(NH2)2). Cavitation induced by ultrasound waves exfoliates and breaks apart the regular …

Damage Detection Using Destructive Testing Of A Reinforced Concrete Slab, Michael Edward Daves

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Visual inspection is one of the primary tools for evaluating the health of bridges as more reach or exceed their intended lifespan. Bridge deterioration must be monitored to ensure continued safety, so owners need maintenance reports to decide on corrective actions. Strategic repair can offer asset managers the benefit of saving money and time; thus, knowing where to locate and what type of repairs can be challenging when relying on visual techniques alone. A tool designed to aid bridge inspectors is the SHE^tm program, which quantitatively measures damage location and severity for any set of time data.