Civil Engineering Commons^™

Circulation, Sediment Concentration And Oxygen Depletion In The Tidal Ems River, Stefan A. Talke, Huib E. De Swart

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present measurements which show that the tidal Ems River in Germ any is extremely muddy over a 30 km + turbid zone, with fluid mud o f 1-2 m thickness covering the bed with suspended sediment concentrations (SSC) o f greater than 50 kg.m^-3. Moreover, we show that these elevated SSC contain large quantities of organic material which deplete dissolved oxygen (DO) and produce summertime hypoxic zones. Using mathematical modeling, we develop simplified representations o f the estuary physics that reproduce the tidally-averaged circulation, SSC distribution, and oxygen depletion. These models show that SSC and oxygen concentrations …

Steel Beams Strengthened With Ultra High Modulus Cfrp Laminates, Nisal Abheetha Peiris

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

Advanced composites have become one of the most popular methods of repairing and/or strengthening civil infrastructure in the past couple of decades. While the use of Fiber Reinforced Polymer laminates and sheets for the repair and strengthening of reinforced concrete structures is well established, research on the application of FRP composites to steel structures has been limited. The use of FRP material for the repair and rehabilitation of steel members has numerous benefits over the traditional methods of bolting or welding of steel plates. Carbon FRPs (CFRPs) have been preferred over other FRP material for strengthening of steel structures since …

Monitoring And Improving The Effectiveness Of Quality Control And Quality Assurance In Road Construction At Al-Ain Municipality, Mohammed Muftah Sultan Al Aryani

Theses

A good roads network has an important bearing on the economic growth of the country. Construction of quality roads, which is considered a primary objective of any highway agencies and contractors, requires concerted efforts on many fronts. Over the past several years, agencies have been working with the construction industry to implement Quality Assurance/Quality Control activities (QA/QC) in an effort to improve the quality of highway construction. They are used as a mean to describe the materials, workmanship, and other general requirements for the project that the highway agencies expect from the contractors. Good specifications should be easy to understand …

Selection Of Source And Use Of Traffic Information In Emergency Situations, R. Michael Robinson, Asad Khattak

VMASC Publications

The access and the use of advanced traveler information systems (ATISs) by drivers during normal commuting have been extensively assessed and analyzed. Emergency managers and transportation officials have extended the results of studies of ATIS use under routine conditions to emergency scenarios under the assumption that drivers' responses to information under emergency conditions mimic those seen under normal driving conditions. A recent survey of potential hurricane evacuees suggests the need to revisit this assumption. Results indicate that although commercial radio reports and variable message signs continue to be the sources of traffic information cited the most frequently, other information sources …

Comparison Of Safety Performance By Design Types At Freeway Diverge Areas And Exit Ramp Sections, Hongyun Chen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The primary objective of the study is to evaluate the safety performance of different freeway exit types used in current practical designs. More specific, the research objectives include the following two parts: 1) to compare the safety performance of different design types at freeway diverge areas and exit ramp sections; and 2) to identify the impact factors contributing to the crashes happening at these two specific segments.

The study area includes four subjects, the freeway widely-spaced diverge areas; the freeway closely-spaced diverge areas; the left-side off-ramps and the exit ramp sections. For the freeway diverge areas, design types were defined …

Universal Design Of Transportation Systems: A Case Study Of Access And Mobility Of People With Disabilities At Selected Intersections In Dar Es Salaam, Nurdin Mushule

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

The pedestrian facilities at intersections must be usable by pedestrians of all ages and capabilities. Intersections in particular must be designed to safely accommodate pedestrians of all ages and physical and mental abilities. Often, however, intersection designs fail to accommodate people with visual and mobility disabilities. In this regard, for pedestrians with disabilities, intersections can prove to be a challenge. Some of those challenges include provision of insufficient pedestrian clearance time due to use of inappropriate design pedestrian speed. Most importantly, the required facilities to enable People With Disabilities (PWD) to use the intersection without hindrance may be missing. Obstacles …

Effects Of Warm-Mix Asphalt Additives On Asphalt Mixture Characteristics And Pavement Performance, Jun Zhang

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The primary objective of this research is to evaluate the feasibility of several WMA mixtures as potential asphalt paving mixtures for Nebraska pavements. To that end, three well-known WMA additives (i.e., Sasobit, Evotherm, and Advera synthetic zeolite) were evaluated. For a more realistic evaluation of the WMA approaches, trial pavement sections of the WMA mixtures and their HMA counterparts were implemented in Antelope County, Nebraska. More than one ton of field-mixed loose mixtures were collected at the time of paving and were transported to the NDOR and UNL laboratories to conduct comprehensive laboratory evaluations and pavement performance predictions of the …

A Generalized Non-Parametric Approach For Uncertainty Evaluation In Travel Time Prediction Models, Bhaven Naik

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A core component within Advanced Traveler Information Systems is travel time information because it is easily understood and perceived by travelers. However, the suggested travel time information should be based not only on historical and real-time conditions, but also on forecasted or “unknown” future conditions.

Existing research has focused primarily on developing models that forecast point estimates of the mean travel time that are in close comparison to their respective field values. There has been limited research on any insight into the reliability or uncertainty margin that exists around the forecasted point estimate. As well, these researches have a limitation …

Soil Behavior Under Blast Loading, Jichong An

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Understanding the behavior of soil under blast loading is very important to engineers in mining, tunneling, and military construction. Due to the very complex structure of a soil mass it is very difficult to describe its constitutive relation, especially when it has different water contents and it is under blast loading conditions. New protective system designs subjected to blast loading need to be proved its validation prior to predict effect of explosive before implementation. Full-scale, buried explosive tests are costly. Finite element simulations play a significant role in the design of protective systems, for example a bottom platform of lightweight …

Embedded Radio Frequency Identification Device License Plates For Roadside Use In Nebraska, Dwight L. Mosby Jr.

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The transportation industry has many stakeholders with different needs that work with advanced technologies. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an emerging technology that is used to track inventory and it holds promise for the transportation industry. This research identifies how to evaluate transportation stakeholder requirements for RFID technologies using a tool described as the House of Quality (HOQ). This research investigates RFID’s ability to work in license plates and may provide infrastructure to support identifying RFID enabled commercial vehicles. This research considers variables that affect the performance of a RFID License Plate System that will use a scanner located at …

Closure To "Estimation Of The Water Balance Using Observed Soil Water In The Nebraska Sandhills", Venkataramana Sridhar, K. G. Hubbard

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

We are thankful to Szilagyi [2010] for providing us an opportunity to discuss the important points of our paper [Sridhar and Hubbard, 2010]. We demonstrated a seasonal water balance assessment using the Modified Thornthwaite-Mather (TM) model in the Nebraska Sandhills. We computed the water budget for a few representative weather monitoring stations located in the Sandhills using the high resolution soil moisture data to assess the storage. In our water balance analysis, soil moisture storage is determined based on observed soil moisture and actual evapotranspiration, ET_act was computed for each month using the change in storage in soil water …

Capacity Reduction And Fire Load Factors For Lrfd Of Steel Members Exposed To Fire, Shahid Iqbal, Ronald S. Harichandran

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

A general reliability-based methodology is proposed for developing capacity reduction and fire load factors for design of steel members exposed to fire. The effect of active fire protection systems (e.g., sprinklers, smoke and heat detectors, fire brigade, etc.) in reducing the probability of occurrence of a severe fire is included. The design parameters that significantly affect the fire design of steel members are chosen as random variables. Raw experimental data published in the literature was analyzed to obtain the statistics of parameters for which no statistical information was available in the literature. Model errors associated with the thermal analysis models …

A Numerical And Experimental Study Of Differential Settling In Cohesive Sediment, Chad Heiliger

All Theses

Accurate sedimentation modeling has important applications in a number of fields. This includes modeling the accumulation of sediment in harbor channels and modeling the sedimentation and accumulation of particles in retention ponds in the still waters behind dams in order to calculate the trap efficiency. By accurately modeling sedimentation, engineering failures such as the 2008 TVA spill at the Kingston Fossil Plant could possibly be avoided. Three different numerical models comparing the settling rates of individual particles in quiescent waters were created to compare the change of settling velocity due to particle size distributions, change of local concentrations, and flocculation …

Correcting Liquefaction Resistance Of Partially Saturated Soil Using Compression Wave Velocity, Md Hossain

All Theses

Empirical relationships for correcting liquefaction resistance of partially saturated soil using longitudinal (P-) wave velocity (V_P) and shear (S-) wave velocity (V_S) are developed and evaluated in this thesis. The relationships are based on the laboratory test results for four different types of sands and one silt published by other investigators. The data used to develop the relationship with V_P exhibit less scatter than the data used to develop the relationship with V_P/V_S. For this reason, the V_P based relationship is recommended for correcting liquefaction resistance of partially saturated soil. …

Safety Evaluation Of Work Zone Practices In Utah, Tomás Ernesto Lindheimer

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Work zones present a risk to drivers and to personnel constructing the roadway. In 2005 work zones accounted for 2.5% of fatalities nationwide, 3.5% for the state of Utah. The goal of this research is to make work zones safer by quantifying the risk that they present to drivers. The approach of this research has been to review part 6 of the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) and compare the differences from the 2003 and 2009 editions, conduct field studies of Utah work zones, and develop a tool for measuring risk in work zones. In the 2009 MUTCD …

Safety Enhancement Of The Indot Network Pavement Friction Testing Program: Macrotexture And Microtexture Testing Using Laser Sensors, Shuo Li, Samy Noureldin, Karen Zhu

JTRP Technical Reports

The Indiana Department of Transportation has conducted annual network inventory friction testing using the locked wheel trailer to reduce wet pavement crashes. However, issues have arisen concerning the data credibility and field operation safety on high-speed highway facilities. Some researchers have investigated the evaluation of pavement friction using macrotexture measurements and found the relationship between friction and macrotexture is extremely weak. Currently, macrotexture can be readily measured at highway speeds, but microtexture is evaluated using friction at low speeds from a surrogate device. Microtexture plays an important role in friction force. The evaluation of pavement friction from texture measurements will …

Site Verification Of Weigh-In-Motion Traffic And Tirtl Classification Data, Shuo Li, Yingzi (Eliza) Du, Yi Jiang

JTRP Technical Reports

Quality weigh-in-motion (WIM) traffic data is essential not only in general transportation application, but also in pavement design. The new AASHTO Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) for New and Rehabilitated Pavement Structures requires information on the detailed truck traffic, such as truck traffic volume, truck traffic monthly and hourly variations, vehicle class distribution, axle load, and axle load distributions, instead of the traditional ESALs. In addition, the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) needs to collect traffic data frequently so as to timely provide accurate traffic information for planning, program development, operations, and pavement management. Currently, INDOT is using the pneumatic …

Estimating And Verifying Household Potential To Conserve Water, Francisco J. Suero

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis identifies impacts of behaviors and technology on residential indoor water use and conservation efforts. We use pre-existing detailed end-use data collected before and after toilets, faucets, showerheads, and clothes washers were retrofitted in 96 owner-occupied, single-family households in Oakland, California; Seattle, Washington; and Tampa, Florida between 2000 and 2003.

Water volume, duration of use, and time of use were recorded and disaggregated by appliance for two weeks before and four weeks after appliances were retrofitted. For each appliance, we compare observed differences in water use before and after retrofits to water savings predicted by analytical engineering, semi-analytical engineering, …

Analysis And Evaluation Of Safety Impacts Of Median Types And Midblock Left Turn Treatments For Urban Arterials, Timur Mauga

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Urban growth leads to new land-uses abutting arterials requiring driveways for their accessibility. Uncontrolled number and locations of such access points causes safety, mobility and accessibility problems. The solution to these problems is access management (AM) which controls the number and location of the access points. AM techniques are normally documented in the form of guidelines for engineers and planners to follow when implementing the techniques. However, AM guidelines may not cover every technique due to the fact that AM is still growing. For example, the current AM guideline prepared by The Nevada Department of Transportation addresses many AM techniques. …

Transportation Network Resiliency: A Fuzzy Systems Approach, Nayel Urena Serulle

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Every day the dependence on transportation grows as local, regional, national, and international independence increases. Resilient transportation systems are needed to secure the highest possible level of service during disruptive events, including natural and man-made disasters. Because of limited resources, decision makers need guidance on how, when, and where to invest to improve resiliency of their networks. The research objective is to develop a method to assess and quantify resiliency, at pre-event conditions, using a fuzzy inference approach. This research expands previous work, refining key variable definitions, adjusting model interactions, and increasing transparency between metrics. This thesis presents the method …