Civil Engineering Commons^™

2014 Road School, Kevin M. Hetrick

Purdue Road School

At the 2014 Road School, this presentation focused on the proposed sliding of the Milton-Madison Bridge, a 15000 ton truss superstructure intended to move laterally 55 feet from a temporary location onto permanent piers. The project was a joint procurement between INDOT and KYTC, with a Design/Build team consisting of Walsh Construction, Buckland and Taylor, and Burgess and Niple performing the slide. The presentation was in early March, with the slide scheduled for later in the month. The slide will be the largest of its kind.

Ada Prowag Status And Common Issues/Solutions, Stephen G. Metzer Aicp, Pws

Purdue Road School

The Proposed Accessibility Guidelines for Pedestrian facilities in the Public Right-of-Way (aka PROWAG), dated July 26, 2011, went through an extensive public comment period that ended in early 2012. The Access Board anticipates issuing final guidance that will be the enforceable standard for facilities in the public ROW. This presentation will provide the latest status of the guidelines and present common problems and creative solutions.

Most Common Errors For Ada Ramp Construction, Stephen G. Metzer Aicp, Pws

Purdue Road School

Curb ramps are essential for persons with disabilities to traverse pedestrian facilities, allowing them to get from street level to the sidewalk. Errors that occur during the construction of curb ramps can result in ramps that are non-compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines. This presentation will include examples of common sidewalk construction errors and offer ways that project engineers can assess existing ramps to identify cases where additional design assistance may be required.

I-65 South Split Continuously Reinforced Concrete Pavement, Tommy E. Nantung

Purdue Road School

Continuously reinforced concrete pavement (CRCP) is constructed with reinforcing steel placed in along the entire length of the pavement. CRCP forms tight transverse cracks to evenly transfer loads without the need of contraction joints. The result is a continuous, smooth-riding pavement surface capable of accommodating heavy traffic loads in a severe environmental condition. First constructed in Indiana more than 75 years ago on US-50, CRCP became popular with the construction of the Interstate Highway system in the 1960s and 1970s. Many sections of interstate and non-interstate highways constructed at that time are still in service today, having outperformed their original …

Ada Focused Construction Inspection, Erik Seef, Eryn Fletcher

Purdue Road School

This presentation will introduce inspection guidelines for field staff to implement in inspecting projects with pedestrian facilities, including curb ramps and pedestrian signals. Review of new INDOT curb standards and requirements for accessible pedestrian signals will be included. These recent changes in standards will impact projects and thus it is imperative to advise field staff of what they should be looking for with regard to width and slopes on pedestrian access routes and pedestrian push buttons. Several issues have been noted in the field, including excessive cross slope and running slope, installation of fingertip-actuated push buttons, and substandard level landings …

Tools For Improving Your Workplace, Ray W. Wilson

Purdue Road School

In this fast-paced session, learn eight practical tools that will help you conduct better meetings, gather, analyze and present data about your organization, and experience how a group can use these tools to quickly learn the causes of problems and to decide where to focus effort.

Kitchen Table Meetings: Applying The Golden Rule To Property Owner Outreach, David N. Goffinet, David Pluckebaum

Purdue Road School

Property impacts are unavoidable with most road construction. Rather than the owner’s first experience being a drilling rig pull up in their drive-way, the kitchen table meeting process takes a proactive approach to sitting down in the “safety and comfort” of their home, upfront to discuss the type and timing of activities that will occur during design, property acquisition and construction— reducing the “unknown” in this multi-year process that happens too fast for some and too slowly for others. Learn how this approach has not only resulted in increased project acceptance and perception, but also in valuable knowledge that can …

Shakers - South Union, Kentucky (Sc 1328), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 1328. Letters, written by South Union, Kentucky Shaker leaders, to leaders of the Hancock Shaker Society, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, discussing the building of mills and dam, economic conditions, and religious affairs. The original letters are in the Library of Congress.

Development Of A Bicycle Level Of Service Methodology For Two-Way Stop-Controlled (Twsc) Intersections, Nathan R. Johnston

Master's Theses

This thesis fills a missing piece in research on multimodal performance measures for traffic on streets and highways. The Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) published by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) provides Level of Service (LOS) methodologies which enable engineers and planners to evaluate the overall performance of roadways and highways based on the physical characteristics of facilities. This allows for the evaluation of those facilities and offers a means for recognizing issues and planning, designing, implementing, and ultimately assessing improvements. Originally, level of service was developed for automotive traffic only, but with recent developments as part of the complete streets …

Tunnel Road Safety: A Look At Older Drivers' Performance And Sight Impairment, Edith Lopez

Master's Theses

In California, there is an observed trend in which collisions cluster in and around tunnels. The break in road continuity created by the tunnels disturbs traffic flow that can lead to collisions. One of the main contrasts between open roads and tunnel roads occurs in lighting. Drivers with sight deficiencies are unable to adapt their sight to the change in the lighting environment and may crash due to misperception of road alignment, vehicle’s speed and other physiological reactions, such as tension. The suspect population group of crashes occurring under the influence of tunnels conditions is older drivers.

The literature suggests …

Bs News March/April

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Analytical System For Planning Of Infrastructure Rehabilitation (Aspire), Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

ASPIRE stands for Analytical System for Planning of Infrastructure REhabilitation, a decision support system that can be used for all kinds of infrastructure facilities. It is based on a rehabilitation modeling theory developed by Professor Makarand Hastak at Purdue University.

Laboratory Study Of The Effect Of Electromagnetic Waves On Airflow During Air Sparging, Atena Najafi, Vahab Bolvardi, Arvin Farid, Jim Browning, Elisa Barney Smith

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Air sparging is a technique that uses the injection of a gas (e.g., air, oxygen) into the subsurface to remediate saturated soils and groundwater contaminated with volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Contaminant-removal efficiency and air-sparging performance are highly dependent on the pattern and type of airflow. Airflow, however, suffers from air channel formation (i.e., preferential paths for airflow), limiting remediation to smaller contaminated zones. This paper presents the results of experimental work investigating the possibility of controlling and improving airflow patterns through a saturated glass-bead medium using electromagnetic (EM) waves to enhance air sparging. The test setup consists of a resonant …

Electromagnetically Induced Transport In Water For Geoenvironmental Applications, Arvin Farid, Atena Najafi, Mahsa Azad, Jim Browning, Elisa Barney Smith

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Air sparging is a popular soil remediation technique that enables the removal of contaminants through diffusing air into soil. The removal process is, however, slow. The goal of this work is to study the effect of electromagnetic (EM) waves —with minimal heat generation— on transport mechanisms such as diffusion, in order to improve airflow or contaminant transport in order to expedite the cleanup process using air sparging or similar technologies. This effect is studied through an experimental setup that examines the diffusion of a nonreactive dye in water under EM waves at a range of frequencies (50-200 MHz). The electric …

Study Of Mechanisms Governing Electromagnetic Alteration Of Hydraulic Conductivity Of Soils, Atena Najafi, Sahba Azad, Arvin Farid, Jim Browning, Elisa Barney Smith

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Hydraulic conductivity is a measure of the rate at which water flows through porous media. Because of the dipole properties of water molecules, electric field can affect hydraulic conductivity. In this study, the effect of radio-frequency (RF) waves on hydraulic conductivity is investigated. This is important both for the geophysical measurement of hydraulic conductivity as well as remediation using electromagnetic waves. Bentonite clay and sandy samples are tested in rigid-wall, cylindrical permeameters and stimulated using a CPVC-cased monopole antenna vertically centered in the permeameters. The permeameters are encased within RF cavities constructed of aluminum mesh in order to prevent interference …

The Stochastic Capacity Of A Roadway: Is It The Answer For Better “Real-Time” Management Of Freeway Operations?, Mandar Khanal

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Rapid growth in vehicles has been observed in many developing countries in recent years. The number of vehicles has grown but non-motorized vehicles have not disappeared. The presence of dissimilar modes of travel results in unsafe roads. Additional factors that exacerbate the traffic problem in these countries are the tendency of users to not observe traffic rules and the lax enforcement of traffic rules by law enforcement agencies. The combination of these factors can be deadly for road users. For example in India, a total of 134,513 people lost their lives to road accidents in 2010 compared to 32,885 road …

Time-Variable Refraction Of The Internal Tide At The Hawaiian Ridge, Edward D. Zaron, Gary D. Egbert

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The interaction of the dominant semidiurnal M₂ internal tide with the large-scale subtidal flow is examined in an ocean model by propagating the tide through an ensemble of background fields in a domain centered on the Hawaiian Ridge. The background fields are taken from the Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA) ocean analysis, at 2-month intervals from 1992 through 2001. Tides are computed with the Primitive Equation Z-coordinate Harmonic Analysis of Tides (PEZ-HAT) model by 14-day integrations using SODA initial conditions and M2 tidal forcing. Variability of the tide is found to occur primarily as the result of propagation through …

Reliability-Based Progressive Collapse And Redundancy Analysis Of Bridge Systems, Feng Miao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Highway bridges like most structural systems are usually designed on a member by member basis and little consideration is provided to the effect of a local failure on system safety. There are concerns that some systems optimized to meet code-specified member design criteria may not provide sufficient levels of structural redundancy to withstand a possible local failure. In fact, a local failure of one structural element may result in the failure of another element creating a chain reaction that might progress throughout the whole structure or a major portion of it leading to a catastrophic collapse. Several recent catastrophic structural …

Study Of The Effect Of Wind Speed On Evaporation From Soil Through Integrated Modeling Of The Atmospheric Boundary Layer And Shallow Subsurface, Hossein Davarzani, Kathleen Smits, Ryan M. T Tolene, Tissa Illangasekare

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications - Archive

In an effort to develop methods based on integrating the subsurface to the atmospheric boundary layer to estimate evaporation, we developed a model based on the coupling of Navier-Stokes free flow and Darcy flow in porous medium. The model was tested using experimental data to study the effect of wind speed on evaporation. The model consists of the coupled equations of mass conservation for two-phase flow in porous medium with single-phase flow in the free-flow domain under nonisothermal, nonequilibrium phase change conditions. In this model, the evaporation rate and soil surface temperature and relative humidity at the interface come directly …

Swell And Shrinkage Strain Prediction Models For Expansive Clays, Anand J. Puppala, Thammanoon Manosuthikij, Bhaskar C. S. Chittoori

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A comprehensive laboratory investigation was conducted to study volume change behaviors of five different types of expansive clayey soils sampled from various regions in Texas, USA. The laboratory test results, which were presented in an earlier paper, are analyzed here to evaluate existing correlations that can be used to predict swell and shrink-related displacements in these soils. The test database is also used to develop newer and practical models for predicting volume change-related soil properties. Models developed here used soil plasticity and compaction properties as independent variables. Newer models, that rely on seasonal compaction moisture content variations in the subsoils, …