Civil Engineering Commons^™

A Two-Stage Direct Integration Approach To Find The Railway Track Profile Using In-Service Trains, Yifei Ren, Jennifer Kennahan, Eugene O'Brien

Civil Engineering Research in Ireland 2020

The railway track is an important element in transportation networks. In recent years, drive-by monitoring of railways has become more popular. Using data measured from in-service trains, the railway profile can be found. In previous research, a complex optimiziton method is used to calculate the railway profile. This paper introduces a new two-stage direct integration approach to find the same track profile much more efficiently. The calculated track profile is similar to a ‘true’ profile and can be used to monitor the condition of the track.

Investigating The Contact-Point Response For Drive-By Damage Detection In Bridges, Robert Corbally, Abdollah Malekjafarian

Civil Engineering Research in Ireland 2020

Bridges are critical elements in any road or rail transport network and ensuring their safety is paramount. Recent years have seen significant research efforts to develop cost-effective techniques for bridge monitoring on a large scale. Drive-by bridge inspection techniques, whereby sensors inside a vehicle are used to monitor bridge condition, are at the focus of much of this work. This paper develops a relationship between the measured response in a vehicle and the contact-point response between the wheel and the surface of a bridge using a quarter-car representation of the vehicle. Numerical simulations are carried out to examine the feasibility …

Composite Behaviour Of Wide Sandwich Panels With High Performance Concrete Thin Wythes With And Without Thermomass Shear Connectors, Jagoda Lipczynska, Roger P. West, Michael Grimes, Dervilla Niall, Oliver Kinnane, Richard Hegarty

Civil Engineering Research in Ireland 2020

To partly address the future sustainability of energy use in buildings, there is a program in Europe to retrofit domestic and commercial buildings with non-load bearing insulated re-cladding and over-cladding panels. Recent research work has shown that limited composite action is possible depending on the type of non-conductive shear connector and the stiffness of the insulation between the inner and outer wythes. This paper reports on the mix design development to develop high strength 20mm thick wythes and the manufacture of sandwich panels with five silicone-bonded layers of XPS insulation, making up a panel which is 220mm thick. These model …

A Review Of Vision Based Methods For Pothole Detection And Road Profile Analysis, Darragh Lydon, Su Taylor, Myra Lydon, Julia Early

Civil Engineering Research in Ireland 2020

This paper is an overview of the development and application of Computer Vision for the detection of pothole, pavement distress and road profile analysis and categorisation. A brief explanation of the traditional methods for determining these factors is given, followed by a chronological description of the evolution and the challenges of using Computer Vision (CV) approaches to determine these conditions. The paper is separated into sections aligned to image capture and analysis methodologies. Qualitative evaluations and comparison of these methods have been provided along with the proposal of guidelines for new computer vision-based road analysis systems.

The Future State Of Mobility, Jerome Quandt

Purdue Road School

Formed in 2018, the Illinois Autonomous Vehicles Association (ILAVA) is a privately funded non-for-profit organization focused on establishing thought leadership in the state of Illinois, by identifying and addressing the current and emerging opportunities related to the inevitable growth of CAV technologies throughout the transportation network. Through the deployment of scalable and sustainable business solutions, facilitating industry education and establishing thought leadership, ILAVA is creating an ecosystem that defines Illinois as #TheFutureStateofMobility.

Solar Powered Parking Lot Lights, Jordyn Taylor

Sustainability Conference

Solar energy is a renewable resource growing exponentially around the country over the past few decades. Solar energy works through the use of photo-voltaic cells, which work to convert energy from sunlight into electricity. This is done within solar panels, which are then connected to batteries for energy storage to use as needed. As production has increased over past decades, the cost for solar panel hardware and installment has thus fallen to meet consumer need. While most common implementations include solar panels attached to one’s home or solar panel ‘fields’ for charging entire towns, there has been a steady rise …

Residential Thermal Storage And Cooling, Joao Marcelo Rocha Belmonte, Jacob Anderson, Andrew Clarke, Daphne Forester, Bianca Hardtke, Josh Hartman, Marc D. Compere

Sustainability Conference

No abstract provided.

Community-Scale Water Treatment Systems In The Dominican Republic, Jonathan Racey, Annabelle Papai, Elise Fischer, Becca Johnson

Engagement & Service-Learning Summit

Engagement and Service-Learning Summit: Reciprocal and Sustainable Partnerships

Purdue Air Sense: A Methodology For Improving The Accuracy Of Ambient Aerosol Mass Concentration And Size Distribution Measurement With Low-Cost Optical Sensing Techniques, Rishabh Ramsisaria, Satya Sundar Patra, Brandon Emil Boor

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

There is a global lack of a means for monitoring air pollutant levels at a local level due to expensive and bulky instrument requirements. It is important to monitor toxic gas levels, as well as particulate matter levels, in the atmosphere to study their effects on human health and to further develop city- and community-level air pollution solutions. In this study, with the means of a Raspberry Pi, low-cost Alphasense Optical Particle Counter and gas sensors, and methodical calibration techniques, we built a portable 3-D printed module powered by clean electricity generated by an on-board Voltaic solar cell that measures …

Indoor Premise Plumbing: The Relationship Between Water Stagnation, Chlorine Decay, And Total Organic Carbon Levels, Emerson M. Ringger, Andrew J. Whelton, Tolulope Odimayomi, Maryam Salehi

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Drinking water safety is critical to the health of populations worldwide, and modern plumbing infrastructure can influence drinking water chemical characteristics. Inside residential and commercial buildings however, water use and contact with different plumbing components can vary. For example, water can endure lengthy stagnation periods and residual disinfectant agents like chlorine can decay, leaving the water vulnerable to microbial growth. Plastic cross-linked polyethylene (PEX) pipes have become popular and have shown to influence water quality. While several studies have been carried out on chemical leaching from PEX piping, none were found that examined the role of pipe diameter in relation …

My Catalyst, Gabrielle Gambino Lyon

Celebration of Learning

Over the course of my internship and shadow program with Pepper Lawson Construction and Ziegler Cooper Architects, I was able to explore the various career paths involved in the design, construction, and civil engineering fields. My work on the construction site of a high-rise apartment building located in the heart of Houston, TX allowed me first-hand experience working and learning alongside project engineers, contractors, building developers, and the construction team.

This project was the perfect confluence of my main areas of interest: structural, mechanical, civil, and environmental engineering, as well as architecture. My daily work consisted of on-site walk throughs, …

Introduction To Infrastructure - The Influence Of Natural Disasters On Infrastructure, Tri Tam Nguyen, Sean M. Raday, Daniel Leverick

STEM Student Research Symposium Posters

In this paper, three major hurricanes in 2017 were examined to determine the damage these hurricanes have done to the infrastructure. Infrastructure has an important role in the nation’s sustained economic development. Infrastructure consists of two main types which are “hard” infrastructure and “soft” infrastructure. Hard infrastructure is the physical networks which include transportation, power, etc. while soft infrastructure is institutions and human capital. Inadequate and inefficient performance of “hard” or “soft” infrastructure would prevent economy from achieving full growth. In the past decades, a significant increase in the number of natural disasters has had great impact on infrastructure systems. …

Full-Water Column Turbulence Parameterization Of Stratified Waters In Southern Lake Michigan, Kyla A. Prendergast, Cary D. Troy, David Cannon

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Full water column mean flow and turbulence structure was characterized at two stratified locations in Lake Michigan (a. Muskegon, MI; b. Michigan City, IN) in order to better understand the filtration potential of invasive quagga mussels. Invasive quagga mussels in Lake Michigan are filter feeders and can dramatically alter clarity as well as the biological/chemical characteristics of the water column. This filtering capacity is highly contingent on turbulence characteristics throughout the water column, which is poorly understood in the Great Lakes. Using velocity, temperature, and turbulence data collected from these locations, the structure of the water column turbulence was modeled …

Electrochemical Removal Of Lead In Water With Multi-Wall Carbon Nanotube Filters, Benjamin M. Stryker, Sol Park, Zhi Zhou

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Heavy metals, such as lead, are highly toxic and typical removal techniques are costly for household applications; causing serious public health risks and economic burdens. Previous studies using electrochemical filtration showed that singe-wall carbon nanotube membranes (SWCNTs) were effective at removing lead, but the use of less expensive multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) has not been fully explored. Therefore, there is a critical need to determine if MWCNTs are cost-effective for the removal of lead in water. The removal efficiency of lead(II) ions in an aqueous solution was evaluated in a flow-through filtration system over 50 minutes at 1.5 mL/min. Calcium …

Fire-Spotting Modelling And Parametrisation For Wild-Land Fires, Inderpreet Kaur, Gianni Pagnini

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This article describes a mathematical formulation for simulating the effects of firebrands on the propagation of the wild-land fires. Among the different approaches available in literature, this formulation is defined in a way to provide a versatile approach for application to operational wildfire models. Most of the operational wildfire models like WRF-SFIRE and ForeFire model only the evolution of the fire-line according to the definition of the rate of spread, fuel characterisation and the average fire properties and concurrent atmospheric conditions. But this information is not enough to simulate the effects of turbulence and fire-spotting. The formulation presented here can …

Optimal Land Use?! – A Review On Optimization Techniques Used In Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Andrea Kaim, Anna Cord, Martin Volk

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Agriculture, forest management, conservation planning and other related disciplines have specific land use demands, and thus different perspectives on how land should be used in an “optimal way”. One way to solve arising land use conflicts is employing the ecosystem services concept together with methods from the field of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). Especially optimization techniques provide the possibility to include socio-economic and ecological aspects as well as the protection of biodiversity. In this study, we give an overview of these methods, focusing especially on their application in agricultural areas. We explore their abilities for the identification of ecosystem service …

Water Supply System Classification For Water Quality Improvement, Bruno Melo Brentan, Gustavo Meirelles Lima, Edevar Luvizotto Junior, Joaquín Izquierdo, Rafael Pérez-García

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Universal access to drinkable water is a constitutional right guaranteed in Brazil. However, not all cities in this country are able to supply the population with the expected quality. Important actions should be taken to improve the supply of drinkable water. To define a strategic plan for this purpose, classification tools can facilitate the design of plans, by grouping cities with similar quality conditions. During the last decades, neural network approaches have been used in environmental models, allowing more accurate representation of some complex systems. This work proposes the use of self-organizing maps (SOM’s) coupled with the k-means algorithm …

A Generator Of Landuse Application For Complex And Heterogeneous Agricultural Practices, Odile Leccia-Phelpin, Jean-Marie Lescot, Françoise Vernier

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Non-point source pollution from agriculture has become a major concern for water managers and institutional stakeholders. To reduce diffuse pollution, agricultural conservation measures are widely used with efficiency. On non-monitored territories environmental modelling enables the assessment of their long term impacts on water and soils and to evaluate land-use change scenarios. We developed an innovative Generator of Landuse (GenLU) application in order to build up multi-year spatial crop successions from identified crop rotations with their related management schedule s. GenLU can be used solely for generating landuse or coupled with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model so as …

Data-Driven Wildfire Behaviour Modelling: Application Of Firefly To Field-Scale Grassland Controlled Burns, M. C. Rochoux, C. Zhang, D. Lucor, S. Ricci, A. Trouve

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Assessing epistemic uncertainties is now considered as a milestone for improving numerical predictions of a dynamically evolving system. The objective of this project is to demonstrate the benefits of data assimilation combined with sensor observations of the fire front position to both quantify and reduce the uncertainties in wildfire behaviour forecasting capability. The challenges found on the route to modelling wildfire behaviour are two-fold. There is the modelling challenge associated with providing accurate representations of the multi-scale multi-physics processes governing wildfire dynamics. There is also the data challenge associated with providing accurate estimates of the environmental conditions (biomass moisture, near-surface …

Atlas: A Tool To Model Spatial-Temporal Dynamics Of Processes Influencing Ecosystem Services, Hugo Thierry, Aude Vialatte, Claude Monteil, Annie Ouin

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Biodiversity provides various benefits to humankind throughout what is defined as ecosystem services. Within a specific ecosystem, a wide range of ecosystem services can be identified. During the past decades, human intervention has aimed to increase some services such as food production through agricultural intensification, at the expense of other services such as water regulation. Mapping, evaluating and quantifying each of these ecosystem services provided by biodiversity to crop production could help to increase the multi-functionality of agricultural landscapes. In this context, we developed a spatially-explicit model called ATLAS (AgriculTural LandscApe Simulator). ATLA …

Understanding The Relationships Between Sanitation And Health In Nicaragua And Honduras, Through Data Mining Tools, Ginevra Marina Lazerini, Josep Nualart, Sergio Ruiz-Cayuela, Maialen Urbina, Miquel Sànchez Marrè, Karina Gibert

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The aim of this work is to analyze water and sanitation supply data from Nicaragua and Honduras by using different data mining tools. The data has been provided by SIASAR (Rural Water and Sanitation Information System), which is a water and sanitation management and information platform created through the joint effort of different Central American Governments and the World Bank. In the study data from a survey performed in all the rural communities in Nicaragua and in a sample of the rural communities in Honduras from 2012 to 2015 is analyzed. Database contains 10206 communities described by 23 numerical variables …

Resilience Of Punta S’Aliga Barrier Beach To Storm Impacts, Andrea Sulis

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Beach and dune provide natural defense against erosion and flooding, and associated mitigation measures are classical coastal engineering problems studied by many researchers. Winter storms cause severe erosion leading to dune breaching and then flooding of the hinterland areas. Resiliency of a barrier beach depends on the ability of the dune (resistor) to recover in height and extent following storms. Whereas erosion of the beach and dune occurs over hours and days, it can be years to decades before the beach and dune are able to recover to their pre-storm state. In the last two decades, numerical modelling methods have …

The Economics Of Agricultural Water Productivity In The Blue Nile, Imeshi Weerasinghe, James Booker, Wim Bastiaanssen, Lisa-Marie Rebelo, Ann Van Griensven

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Agricultural Water Productivity (AWP) is often simplified as the ‘crop per drop’, described as the output in terms of yield or biomass per unit of water input. This purely physical measure of Water Productivity (WP) using only a single factor input (water) does not consider: (1) the level of other inputs used in conjunction with water, (2) the opportunity cost of water as an input, (3) the value of the output and (4) the costs of production for different crops. This study presents a justification and methodology for incorporating these factors into WP indicators. The application of these extensions to …

E3.Pt – An E3 Portabledyme Model For Portugal, Anett Großmann, Frank Hohmann

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

E3 models are environmentally extended economic models. They are extensively used for impact assessment of energy, climate and resource policies at national and international level. E3 models have proven to be suitable tools for quantifying effects on the economy, environment and energy system. Usually, the structure and documentation of such models are only accessible by the model builders. They are facing the allegation to be a "black box" meaning that only their creators are able to operate and fully understand the model system. Decision makers are often only engaged at the end of the model building process to discuss the …

A Mathematical Model For Ghg From Sb-Mbr: Calibration By An Innovative Protocol, Giorgio Mannina, Alida Cosenza

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

A mathematical model to quantify greenhouse gases (GHG) (carbon dioxide, CO₂ and nitrous oxide, N₂O) for a membrane bioreactor (MBR) is presented. The model has been applied to a pilot plant with a pre-denitrification MBR scheme. The pilot plant was cyclically filled with real saline wastewater according to the fill-draw-batch operation. The model was calibrated by adopting a specific protocol based on extensive field dataset. Standardised Regression Coefficient (SRC) method was adopted to select the most influential model factors to be calibrated. Results related to SRC method show that among the important model factors a key role …

Sectorization Of Intermittent Water Supply Networks Based On Graph Theory And Clustering Techniques, Amilkar E. Ilaya-Ayza, David Ayala-Cabrera, Joaquín Izquierdo, Enrique Campbell, Rafael Pérez-García

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Intermittent water supply is the form of access to water in many countries around the world. It is very common that design, operation, maintenance and, in general, decision-making in these systems are performed using tools originally developed for systems with continuous supply, which are not adequate. However, these tools can be reasonably applied to network sectorization of intermittent supply networks. We propose a sectorization methodology for networks that do not have the possibility of working with continuous supply. In addition, to ensure sufficient pressure, sector design must guarantee equity in the supply. Furthermore, it is not enough to establish sector …

A Framework For Decision-Making In Cases Of Invasive Species, Peter A. Khaiter, Marina G. Erechtchoukova, Sina Roushan

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Invasion of nonindigenous species is one of the most pressing global challenges, causing substantial environmental, economic and social harm. Invasion of alien species alters the composition, structure and functioning of invaded ecosystems as well as the services they generated before the invasion. Decisions about the management of invasive cases are inherently difficult because of the multifactorial and multiattribute scope of the problem. In particular, the resilience limits of invaded ecosystems to fully recover original, pre-invaded states remain unclear. To facilitate management efforts, decision-makers and environmental practitioners require a framework integrating relevant knowledge and acting as a supporting expert system. The …

Cool Farm Tool (Cft) Water: Novel Tool For Water Resource Assessment On Field Scale, Benjamin Kayatz, Gabriele Baroni, Benjamin Kuster, Stefan Lüdtke, Daniella Malin, Richard Heathcote, Carl Von Tonder, Martin Wattenbach

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

At the global scale over 70 % of all fresh water used is consumed by the agricultural sector. For this reason a sustainable water management at the basin level often requires the assessment of water that is used for crop production. In this context, the characterization of green and blue water footprint showed to be a useful and efficient approach to support analysis and decisions.

However determining the water footprint is cumbersome and often linked to additional data acquisition efforts. Furthermore the water footprint is often not revealing the basin impact of crop production. To overcome these limitations we developed …

A Markov Decision Process Model To Compare Ecosystem Services Provided By Agricultural Landscapes, Sabrina Gaba, Nathalie Peyrard, Régis Sabbadin, Julia Radoszyckic

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

One current challenge in managing agricultural landscapes, is to reach a trade-off between provision of food and biodiversity conservation. Two extreme land-use strategies, land sharing and land sparing, are often discussed. The design of decision rules for allocating crops and lands for biodiversity conservation (e.g. grasslands) can be formalized as an optimization problem. However the target to optimize, representing the trade-off between ecosystem services (ES) can be complex to model since ES are usually not defined on comparable scales and may rely on different sides of biodiversity. Here, we will investigate how landscape composition and structure affect the magnitude of …

Advanced Clustering To Integrate Spatial Socio-Ecological Components In Decision-Making: A Case Study On Sustainable Agriculture, Stéphane Bourrelly, Antonino Marvuglia, Ian Vázquez-Rowe

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Accounting for the direct and indirect role of ecosystem services (ES) in supporting human activities is a priority among governmental targets to develop strategies of impact mitigation with the mutual effect of increasing human well-being. Although a great deal of research is currently being done on ES assessment, the volume of available data and the complexity of mechanisms make the decision-making process difficult. We highlight the strengths of unsupervised clustering for handling geographic multidimensional datasets. We explain why the outputs, both in qualitative and quantitative form, can help stakeholders to conceive sustainable policies. At the same time, we point out …