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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Field Procedure For Estimating The Measurement Area Of Non-Contact Temperature Sensors, M. Khanal, R. Davidson Oct 2013

Field Procedure For Estimating The Measurement Area Of Non-Contact Temperature Sensors, M. Khanal, R. Davidson

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Transportation departments across the United States have installed sensors mounted on towers by the roadside to measure road surface temperatures. Since no guidelines exist for verifying the accuracy of such measurements, agencies are forced to accept claims made by vendors. To correct this situation, the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) contracted with Boise State University (BSU) to test the accuracy of the non-contact, infrared temperature sensors installed throughout Idaho. Before collecting independent temperature data, BSU devised an easy-to-use procedure for determining the effective area viewed by the infrared sensors. According to ITD, the vendor claimed that at a distance of 10 …


Design And Performance Of A Skid-Mounted Portable Compartment Fire Gas Furnace And Monitoring System, K. Mueller, Y. Kurama, M. Mcginnis, M. Lisk Sep 2013

Design And Performance Of A Skid-Mounted Portable Compartment Fire Gas Furnace And Monitoring System, K. Mueller, Y. Kurama, M. Mcginnis, M. Lisk

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A custom, portable natural gas fire furnace was designed and constructed for use at the University of Notre Dame to experimentally investigate the out-of-plane behavior of full-scale reinforced concrete (RC) bearing walls under fire. The unique aspects of this furnace allowed the application of large mechanical loads and non-contact optical response monitoring to be done while subjecting the wall to elevated temperatures. The performance of the experimental furnace, mechanical loading, and response monitoring system is reported using the results from the first two RC wall test specimens.


Swell And Shrinkage Characterizations Of Unsaturated Expansive Clays From Texas, Anand J. Puppala, Thammanoon Manosuthikij, Bhaskar C. S. Chittoori Sep 2013

Swell And Shrinkage Characterizations Of Unsaturated Expansive Clays From Texas, Anand J. Puppala, Thammanoon Manosuthikij, Bhaskar C. S. Chittoori

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Expansive soils have long been recognized as problematic because they cause failure to civil structures constructed above them. The main problem of these soils can be attributed to poor understanding of the volume changes caused by moisture fluctuations. Current swell and shrinkage characterization models are limited by both the lack of standardized tests and tests that employ volume changes in uniaxial direction. In the present research, a comprehensive laboratory investigation was undertaken to study the volume change related swell–shrinkage behaviors of five different types of expansive clayey soils sampled from various regions in Texas, USA. Extensive experimental programs consisting of …


Electromagnetic Stimulation Of Transport In Water For Geoenvironmental Applications, A. Farid, M. Azad, J. Browning, Elisa H. Barney Smith Aug 2013

Electromagnetic Stimulation Of Transport In Water For Geoenvironmental Applications, A. Farid, M. Azad, J. Browning, Elisa H. Barney Smith

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Air sparging is a popular soil remediation technique that enables the removal of contaminants by diffusing air into saturated zones of 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 and 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 between …


Consequences Of Electromagnetic Stimulation On Hydraulic Conductivity Of Soils, A. Farid, S. Azad, J. Browning, Elisa H. Barney Smith Aug 2013

Consequences Of Electromagnetic Stimulation On Hydraulic Conductivity Of Soils, A. Farid, S. Azad, J. Browning, Elisa H. 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, any 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 …


Accuracy Analysis Of Parallel Method Based On Non-Overlapping Domain Decomposition Method, Moonho Tak, Yooseob Song, Hye-Kwan Jeon, Taehyo Park Aug 2013

Accuracy Analysis Of Parallel Method Based On Non-Overlapping Domain Decomposition Method, Moonho Tak, Yooseob Song, Hye-Kwan Jeon, Taehyo Park

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, an accuracy analysis of parallel method based on non-overlapping domain decomposition method is carried out. In this approach, proposed by Tak et al.(2013), the decomposed subdomains do not overlap each other and the connection between adjacent subdomains is determined via simple connective finite element named interfacial element. This approach has two main advantages. The first is that a direct method such as gauss elimination is available even in a singular problem because the singular stiffness matrix from floating domain can be converted to invertible matrix by assembling the interfacial element. The second is that computational time and …


Explaining The Hydroclimatic Variability And Change In The Salmon River Basin, Venkataramana Sridhar, Xin Jin, W. Thilini Jaksa Apr 2013

Explaining The Hydroclimatic Variability And Change In The Salmon River Basin, Venkataramana Sridhar, Xin Jin, W. Thilini Jaksa

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Climate change in the Pacific Northwest and in particular, the Salmon River Basin (SRB), is expected to bring about 3–5 °C rise in temperatures and an 8 % increase in precipitation. In order to assess the impacts due to these changes at the basin scale, this study employed an improved version of Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model, which includes a parallel version of VIC combined with a comprehensive parameter estimation technique, Shuffled Complex Evolution (SCE) to estimate the streamflow and other water balance components. Our calibration (1955–1975) and validation (1976–1999) of the model at the outlet of the basin, White …


Groundwater Levels In Northern Texas High Plains: Baseline For Existing Agricultural Management Practices, Jairo E. Hernández, Prasanna H. Gowda, Thomas H. Marek, Terry A. Howell, Wonsook Ha Mar 2013

Groundwater Levels In Northern Texas High Plains: Baseline For Existing Agricultural Management Practices, Jairo E. Hernández, Prasanna H. Gowda, Thomas H. Marek, Terry A. Howell, Wonsook Ha

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

New groundwater policies are being debated for the Northern Texas High Plains because of Ogallala Aquifer depletion. These policies should be evaluated using a calibrated groundwater model for assessing their impact on subsequent groundwater levels. The objective of this study was to calibrate and validate a regional groundwater model for predicting the impact of existing agricultural management practices on groundwater levels beneath 4 counties located in the Northern Texas High Plains. Results indicated that the MODFLOW-2000 groundwater model was calibrated and validated satisfactorily based on reproducing and comparing groundwater levels with coefficients of determination of 0.97 and 0.98, root mean …


Evaluation Of The Complementary Relationship Using Noah Land Surface Model And North American Regional Reanalysis (Narr) Data To Estimate Evapotranspiration In Semiarid Ecosystems, W. Thilini Jaksa, Venkataramana Sridhar, Justin L. Huntington, Mandar Khanal Feb 2013

Evaluation Of The Complementary Relationship Using Noah Land Surface Model And North American Regional Reanalysis (Narr) Data To Estimate Evapotranspiration In Semiarid Ecosystems, W. Thilini Jaksa, Venkataramana Sridhar, Justin L. Huntington, Mandar Khanal

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Estimating evapotranspiration using the complementary relationship can serve as a proxy to more sophisticated physically based approaches and can be used to better understand water and energy budget feedbacks. The authors investigated the existence of complementarity between actual evapotranspiration (ET) and potential ET (ETp) over natural vegetation in semiarid desert ecosystems of southern Idaho using only the forcing data and simulated fluxes obtained from Noah land surface model (LSM) and North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) data. To mitigate the paucity of long-term meteorological data, the Noah LSM-simulated fluxes and the NARR forcing data were used in the advection–aridity …