Engineering Science and Materials Commons^™

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2009, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Each student in his or her senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. The senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real-world solution to an engineering challenge.

A highlight of the year-long senior design project is the senior design competition. This competition, which usually takes place the week before finals each semester, helps focus the senior students on increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects.

Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on innovation, commercial …

Relationship Between Impact Energy And Fracture Toughness Of Prestressed Concrete Railway Sleepers, Sakdirat Kaewunruen, Alexander Remennikov

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

The prestressed concrete sleepers (or railroad ties), which are installed in railway track systems as the crosstie beam support, are designed to carry and transfer the wheel loads from the rails to the ground. It is well known that railway tracks are subject to impact loading conditions, which are attributable to the train operations with either wheel or rail abnormalities such as flat wheels, dipped rails, etc. These loads are of very high magnitude but short duration. In addition, there exists the potential of repeated load experience during the design life of prestressed concrete sleepers. Prestressed concrete has played a …

Influence Of Ballast Conditions On Flexural Responses Of Railway Concrete Sleepers, Sakdirat Kaewunruen, Alex M. Remennikov

Sakdirat Kaewunruen

Railway sleepers in track systems are usually modeled using the beam on elastic foundation theory. In reality, the sleeper-supported ballast is of highly frictional granular media but does not provide any tensile resistance. This paper presents a finite element model of a railway sleeper in a track system, taking into account the tensionless nature of the elastic support. The highlight of this paper is the effect of ballast distributions on the flexural responses of railway sleepers in track systems. Using a finite element package STRAND7, the finite element model updating of the concrete sleeper was earlier developed and validated against …

Assessing Repeatability Of Four-Point Bending Method For Estimating Fatigue Cracking Of Hot Mix Asphalt, Sara -. Montazeri

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this thesis was to assess the repeatability of four-point bending method for estimating fatigue cracking of hot mix asphalt. This experimental research examined the influence of mix proportions, specifically asphalt and air void contents, on fatigue behavior of asphalt beam specimens in the laboratory tested with four-point bending method of loading. Following the relevant specifications, the strain-controlled mode of loading was selected. Fatigue failure is expected to occur at the cycle which the flexural stiffness of asphalt specimen reduced to 50% of initial amount. Up to a 1,000,000 cycles of loading were applied to each specimen.

Different …