Engineering Commons^™

Innovative Contracting Manual, Bob Mccullouch

JTRP Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Investigation Of The Geotechnical Properties Of Municipal Solid Waste As A Function Of Placement Conditions, Wilson W. Wong

Master's Theses

An investigation of the variability of engineering properties of municipal solid waste as a function of placement conditions was conducted. Limited data have been reported for the engineering properties of municipal solid waste (MSW) as a function of placement conditions. Wastes have high variability of engineering properties due to heterogeneity in composition and component size; influence from time based effects; and presence of compressible solids. Control of moisture content of MSW at the time of waste placement provides opportunity for increased capacity at a given landfill site due to higher compacted unit weight as well as for control of other …

Pilot Rainwater Harvesting Study Ireland, Liam Mccarton, Sean O'Hogain, Anna Reid, Niamh Mcintyre, Jenny Pender

Conference papers

There are no National Water Quality Standards for Rainwater Harvesting supply in Ireland. The Development Technology Centre (DTC) at the Technological University Dublin was commissioned by the National Rural Water Monitoring Committee in 2005 to assess the feasibility of using rainwater harvesting to supplement treated mains water for non-potable uses. The project involved the design, installation, commissioning and monitoring of rainwater harvesting facilities for rural domestic and agricultural water supply. This paper will present the results from the domestic pilot rwh project. A dual water supply system was designed and installed to use rainwater collected from the roof surface to …

Frp Confined Reinforced Concrete Circular Cross Section Seismic Applications, Jeffrey G. Lyon

Master's Theses

In recent earthquakes, structures have not performed as well as expected resulting in a need for better means of retrofitting and improvements in seismic design. Fiber Reinforced Polymers (FRP), as a material with potential to increase strength and ductility of columns in conjunction with capacity design methodology, has promise for seismic design. By investigating the displacement, ductility, and flexural strength properties of FRP confined reinforced concrete circular cross sections, this study analyzes the seismic applications of FRP confinement.

The study is performed by incorporating an FRP confined concrete stress-strain model into a developed Moment-Curvature and PM Interaction software. This software …

Effects Of Bypasses, Jon D. Fricker, Joshua B. Mills

JTRP Technical Reports

This study aims to investigate the long-term impacts of bypasses on small- and medium-sized communities in Indiana. Interviews were conducted with community officials and individuals familiar with the history of each bypassed community. Statistical models were developed to analyze economic impacts across a number of key indicators including payroll and employment in various industry sectors. Lessons learned from this study vary from county to county and across industry sectors. The findings of this study will be used to develop a concise guide that will provide guidance to both Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) officials and community officials as to how …

Seismic Evaluation Of Clark County Critical Bridges Using Nonlinear Static Procedures, Ahmad Said Saad

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Bridges are vital connective elements in community transportation systems. In the past, bridges have been severely damaged by earthquakes. However, with proper mitigation techniques, such as bridge retrofit, severe earthquake damage to bridges can be avoided. Since the 1970’s, design codes underwent major changes with regard to seismic analysis and design provisions of structures and bridges. Meanwhile, one third of the nation’s 600,000 inventoried highway bridges are considered as either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

This study is a part of the “Earthquakes in Southern Nevada” project. Earlier in this project, buildings and bridges in southern Nevada were studied in …

Verification Of Lrfd Bridge Design And Analysis Software For Indot, Amit H. Varma, Jungil Seo

JTRP Technical Reports

NCHRP Process 12-50 was implemented to evaluate and verify composite steel I-girder bridge design software used commonly in Indiana. A test-bed of twenty one bridges was developed with the guidance from an Indiana Department of Transportation appointed research advisory panel (RAP). The test-bed included five simple-span and sixteen multi-span bridge superstructures. More than 80 parameters were required to define a bridge and they include bridge span, girder spacing, number of beams, section type, steel strength, girder sections, and other required bridge parameters. Some of these parameters were initially selected by INDOT and practitioners.

An indigenous computer program PURDUE CSBD was …

A Method For Accounting For Pile Setup And Relaxation In Pile Design And Quality Assurance, Prasenjit Basu, Rodrigo Salgado, Monica Prezzi, Tanusree Chakraborty

JTRP Technical Reports

When piles are installed by jacking or driving, they cause substantial changes in the state of soil located near the pile. These changes result from the complex loading imposed on the soil by expansion of a cylindrical cavity to make room for the pile, by multiple cycles of shearing in the vertical direction as the pile gradually moves down into the ground, and by the slow drainage associated with clayey soils. If a pile is load-tested a short time after installation, it will develop an axial resistance that reflects the existence in the soil of the excess pore pressures caused …

Origin-Destination Tools For District Offices, Jon D. Fricker, Maria Martchouk

JTRP Technical Reports

Understanding through trip patterns is crucial when making decisions concerning a traffic diversion strategy, such as whether to build a highway to bypass a city. While conducting a vehicle license plate origin-destination survey may be the most accurate way to estimate through trip patterns, many small communities may be unable to bear this cost. Thus, a simple and affordable sketch planning tool to estimate through trip movements would be useful. Three through trip estimation methods that have been used or published are Modlin’s method, Anderson’s method, and subarea analysis. Subarea analysis, while an effective tool, requires personnel with knowledge of …

Review Construction Techniques For Accelerated Construction And Cost Implications, Joo Hyoung (Jay) Lee, Bob G. Mccullouch

JTRP Technical Reports

Transportation construction activities on heavy traffic routes can be very disruptive to the system users due to lane closures, construction traffic, or reduced speed zones. Besides the driving public, local businesses are also affected by noise and air pollution, loss of access, or changing access routes. Thus, it is apparent that minimizing construction time will lessen these impacts. The primary objectives of this project are to explore some alternative methods to expedite construction time for particular project types whereby mitigating disruptions to the traveling public and to identify construction activities that can be accelerated by those selected methods. To accomplish …

A Novel Tdr-Based Coaxial Cable Sensor For Crack/Strain Sensing In Reinforced Concrete Structures, Shishuang Sun, David Pommerenke, James L. Drewniak, Genda Chen, Liang Xue, Michael A. Brower, Marina Koledintseva

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Novel coaxial cable sensors that feature high sensitivity and high spatial resolution are developed for health monitoring of concrete structures using a time-domain reflectometry (TDR). The new sensor was designed based on the topology change of its outer conductor, which was fabricated with tightly wrapped commercial tin-plated steel spiral covered with solder. The cracks that developed within concrete structures will lead to out-of-contact of local steel spirals. This topology change results in a large impedance discontinuity that can be measured with a TDR. A simplified equivalent transmission line model and numerical full-wave simulations using finite-difference time-domain techniques were used to …

Operation Assessment Of Reservoirs In The Savannah River Basin, Travis Yates

All Theses

Hydropower is generated from three reservoirs in the United States Army Corps of Engineer's Savannah District. These reservoirs include J. Strom Thurmond, Richard B. Russell, and Hartwell. Currently, a contract in place specifies that certain amount of energy must be provided to the region. The contract for the hydropower was based upon the critical hydrologic year of 1981. Historically, this was the most severe drought on record and assumed to provide the lowest net inflows for the three reservoirs, thus providing an attainable or reliable energy amount for the system, which suggests a dependable energy yield.
Reevaluating the contract amount …

Moisture Susceptibility Of Asphalt Mixes Using Phosphonylated Recycled Polyethylene, David Herndon

All Dissertations

ABSTRACT
Today's asphaltic concrete pavements are expected to perform better even though they are experiencing increased volume of traffic and increased loads over what has been experienced in the past. Research has indicated that the addition of polymers to asphalt binders can enhance many properties of the asphalt pavements to help meet these increased demands.
There remains a serious problem that the addition of polymers to asphalt binders generally does not address. This involves the interfacial cohesiveness of the bond between the aggregate and the binder. Some aggregates are highly hydrophilic (water-loving) while asphalt binders and most polymers tend to …

Synthesis Of Optimal Usage Of Available Aggregates In Highway Construction And Maintenance, Benjamin Skidmore

All Theses

The optimization of the available aggregates for highway construction and maintenance is vital both from an economic and environmental perspective. By not optimizing the aggregate supply project costs escalate as a simple response to supply and demand, and just as important the fact that aggregate is a natural resource and a limited one, it is crucial that is used as efficiently as possible. This paper examines specifically the use of aggregates by the South Carolina Department of Transportation, but can easily be adapted to any state. Through DOT and quarry surveys and an examination of aggregate gradation specifications it was …

Hydraulic Modeling To Inform Stream Maintenance Practices In South Carolina, Kelly Owens

All Theses

The Crabtree Canal located in Horry County, SC is the main conveyor of stormwater in a watershed that has undergone considerable urbanization in the last few decades. Evidence of bank instability and inchannel erosion is widely seen in the Crabtree Canal system. Principal sediment inputs are landscape sources and in-channel sources. A study was initiated to provide a working management tool to determine hydrodynamic conditions on the watershed driven by a hypothetical storm event and alternative channel configurations. The management tool comprised of a one-dimensional HEC-RAS model of the Crabtree Canal and was developed to aid the Horry County stormwater …

Farmer, James E. (Sc 1696), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 1696. Paper: "River Transportation in Kentucky" written by James E. Farmer for a Western Kentucky State Teachers College class. He writes about the history and economic benefits of Kentucky's rivers.

Applications Of Electricity In The Rehabilitation And Health Monitoring Of Concrete Structures, Saiprasad Vaidya

Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation research work presented herein consists of two separate findings: one investigates a potential new coating technique that could be used to rehabilitate deteriorated concrete sewer pipes, and the other researches inducing electrical conductivity into geopolymer concrete to serve as smart material by being able to sense stress changes. Both applications utilize electricity to enhance the performance and/or functionality of hardened cementitious materials.

Microbiologically induced corrosion (MIC) in concrete wastewater conveyance systems is a leading deterioration mechanism in such structures. This work focuses on breaking the MIC cycle by preventing colonization of the bacteria responsible for converting hydrogen sulfide …

Creation Of A Committed Johnsongrass Area And Implementation Study, D. James Morre

JTRP Technical Reports

This project was to develop a committed roadside Johnson grass research area with controlled mowing and date of spraying adjacent to US 63 from I 74 south to JCT US 36 and to continue studies of a cold-adapted Johnson grass ecotype identified in the Northern-most tier counties in Indiana in an area adjacent to IN 23 between South Bend and New Liberty, IN. The cold-adapted Johnson grass provides a further threat of encroachment of roadside-established Johnson grass onto adjacent cropland of considerable potential economic consequence.

Completed was a 3-year study with Roundup alone and in combination with Outrider either as …

The Impacts Of Biofuels On Transportation And Logistics In Indiana, Frank Dooley, Wallace Tyner, Kumares C. Sinha, Justin Quear, Lydia Cox, Maria Cox

JTRP Technical Reports

Like the rest of the US, the ethanol industry in Indiana has rapidly expanded, growing from one plant in 2006 to a projected 13 by 2010. One result of this expansion is that truck and rail traffic flows in Indiana are shifting, as more corn and beans are processed in state. Most of the change in transportation requirements will likely be concentrated in regions of Indiana where the ethanol plants are constructed.

The goal of this work was to determine how the entry of ethanol and biodiesel plants changes the inbound and outbound transportation flows of corn, soybeans, DDGS, and …

Bs News

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Real-Time Socio-Economic Data For Travel Demand Modeling And Project Evaluation, Kevin M. Ford, Jon D. Fricker

JTRP Technical Reports

Small and medium-sized communities often lack data that are complete, current, representative of the community, and appropriate for the travel demand models/software to be applied. To aid such communities, this research was conducted to meet the following objectives:

(1) Identify and facilitate the communication of data that is updated more frequently than the Decennial Census for Indiana Travel Demand Models;

(2) Allow the use of cross-classification techniques within trip generation for planning organizations that lack the time and resources to conduct travel demand/household surveys;

(3) Evaluate the sensitivity of travel demand model outputs to varied parameters and inputs so as …

Construction Costs - Using Federal Vs. Local Funds, Varun Kishore, Dulcy M. Abraham

JTRP Technical Reports

Costs of highway construction projects have been rising with rising prices of construction materials such as asphalt, concrete and steel. Identifying cost saving strategies is one of the ways of efficient utilization of available funds (federal and local) by the state Department of Transportations (DOTs) and Local Public Agencies (LPAs). A case study comprising of a sample pair of projects (a federal-aid project and a 100% locally funded project) constructed in Elkhart County, Indiana was undertaken to compare construction costs when sources of funding vary. Based on analysis of cost details from these two projects and discussions with the general …

Towards The Efficient Probabilistic Characterization Of Tropical Cyclone-Generated Storm Surge Hazards Under Stationary And Nonstationary Conditions, Senanu Kudjo Agbley

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The scarcity of observations at any single location confounds the probabilistic characterization of tropical cyclone-generated storm surge hazards using annual maxima and peaks-over-threshold methods. The EST and the JPM are indirect approaches aimed at estimating the probability distribution of the response variable of interest (i.e. storm surge) using the probability distributions of predictor variables (e.g. storm size, storm intensity etc.). In the first part of this work, the relative performance of the empirical simulation technique (EST; Borgman et al., 1992) and the joint probability method (JPM; Myers, 1970) is evaluated via stochastic simulation methods. It is shown that the JPM …

Geometrically Nonlinear Arc Length Sparse Finite Element Analysis And Optimal Design Of Truss Structures, Glenn A. Hrinda

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A technique for the optimization of stability-constrained geometrically nonlinear shallow trusses with snap-through behavior is demonstrated using the arc length method and a strain energy density approach within a discrete finite element formulation. The optimization method uses an iterative scheme that evaluates the performance of the design variables and then updates them according to a recursive formula that is controlled by the arc length method. A minimum weight design is achieved when a uniform nonlinear strain energy density is found in all members. This minimal condition places the design load just below the critical-limit load that causes snap-through of the …

Using Geographically Weighted Regression Models To Analyze Crash Harm, Libin Zheng

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Society pays a high cost for collisions in terms of property damage, injuries and loss of life. This paper has two objectives. One is to examine various factors associated with harm caused by highway collisions. Both global OLS and local GWR models are provided to identify specific variables influencing crash harm. Another objective is to demonstrate the use of a Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) method in this complex safety problem, which can estimate models for each crash location and show spatial variation. The results show that the GWR model is a significant improvement on the OLS model; the test for …

Auditing Of Traffic Signs And Road Markings In Dar Es Salaam City, Hannibal Bwire

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

This study examines the efficacy of the traffic signs and road markings in Dar es Salaam City. The study focuses on the availability and conditions of traffic signs and road markings in some selected roads in the city. Auditing of traffic signs and road markings is carried out as one of the means of promoting road safety and improving road capacity in the city. The auditing procedure involved field studies through the use of traffic signs/markings checklists and ranking of road stretches according to the availability and conditions of traffic signs observed for improvement prioritization in case of financial constraints. …

The “Tea Cup Effect” And Removal Of Suspended Solids From Water, D.A. Mashauri

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

Suspended solids problem in water is an issue as old as water treatment itself. Suspended solids can be causative to eroding through abrasion of impellers, pump casings, pipes and other water works related appurtenances. It is therefore appropriate that suspended solids must be removed as early as possible in the water works treatment facilities. It is usually done at the river/lake intakes to reduce the coarse particulate matter that would otherwise adversely affect the water works thereafter. The fine particles that will escape the entrapment at the intake works would therefore require further and more effective system that would remove …

Successes Of An Engineering Residential College Program Within An Emerging Residential Culture, Sondra Miller, Pat Pyke, Amy Moll, Melissa Wintrow, Cheryl Schrader, Janet Callahan

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Boise State University is in the process of transforming from a historically "commuter" campus into a metropolitan research university which includes a growing residential culture (currently 8% of students live in residence halls). First time, full time freshmen age 18 or younger have increased from 61% of the incoming class in 2000 to 72% of the incoming class in 2008. To support our growing residential culture, University Housing, in cooperation with six academic colleges, began the Residential College (RC) program in 2004. Key among the five current RC communities is the College of Engineering. The Engineering Residential College (ERC) admits …

Performance-Based Testing Methodology For Concrete Durability, Niall Holmes, P. A.Muhammed Basheer, Sreejith Nanukuttan, Lulu Basheer

Reports

This report presents an overview of performance based testing methodology for concrete durability and work currently underway jointly at Queens University Belfast and Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, to undertake this research under a EPSRC funded project (EP/G02152X/1).

EN206-1 superseded BS 5328 on 1^st December 2003 and allows designers and producers to use a wide range of cements and aggregate types for a variety of exposure conditions. In this new standard, the durability of concrete is specified in terms of the constituent materials of concrete, properties of fresh and hardened concrete, limitations for concrete composition, specification of concrete, delivery of …

Performance Monitoring Of Cover-Zone Concrete, Niall Holmes, John Mccarter, Malcolm Chrisp, Gerry Starrs, Sreejith Nanukuttan, Lulu Basheer, Niall Holmes, Muhammed Basheer

Conference papers

The concrete cover-zone is a major factor governing the degradation of concrete structures as it provides the only barrier to aggressive agents which initiate corrosion of the reinforcement. Knowledge of the protective qualities of cover-zone concrete is critical in attempting to make predictions as to the in-service performance of the structure with regard to likely deterioration rates for a particular exposure condition and compliance with specified design life. To this end, a multi-electrode array was used to study the surface 50mm of concrete specimens thereby allowing a detailed picture of the response of the covercrete to the changing environment. In …