Engineering Commons^™

Bim And Digital Twins In Infrastructure Projects: An Overview From The Transportation Professional's Perspective, Natállia Mendes

LSU Master's Theses

Transport infrastructure has undergone significant changes in recent years due to the digitalization of construction methods. Consequently, there is an increasing demand for more productive and cost-effective technologies to optimize various aspects such as time, cost, changes, waste, and errors in projects. Notably, technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Digital Twin (DT) hold the potential to enhance the performance of infrastructure projects. While BIM has received substantial attention in recent years, Digital Twin is relatively new to the construction industry. This leads to a scarcity of studies on DT and its integration with other emerging technologies like BIM. …

Residential Building Flood Risk Assessment And The Benefits Of Home Elevation, Ayat Al Assi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Evaluating flood risk is an essential component of understanding and increasing community resilience. A robust approach for quantifying flood risk in terms of average annual loss (AAL) in dollars is needed to provide valuable information for stakeholder decision-making inside and outside the special flood hazard area (SFHA, which corresponds to the 100-year floodplain). To further inform flood mitigation strategies, quantifying flood risk reduction with home elevation above an initial first-floor height (FFH₀) and the cost effectiveness of federal mitigation assistance for elevation are important steps to enhance awareness of the effect of elevation in reducing flood risk. …

An Improved Earned Value Management Method Integrating Quality And Safety, Brian Briggs

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The construction industry invests significant time and money to improve quality and safety while reducing cost and schedule impacts. The industry has a sincere desire to improve construction project management methods to improve efficiency. Historically, quality and safety underperformances result from undermanaged quality control and safety activities. The cost and schedule impacts associated with poor quality work have always had an impact on construction operations. The unprecedented challenges and uncertainties of COVID-19 highlighted the need to improve the Earned Value Management (EVM) method within construction to reflect these quality and safety activities. The central goal of this dissertation is to …

Impact Of Personality Traits And Team Criteria On Construction Team Performance, Arlys Silva Payne

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigated how personality traits and team criteria influence team performance in real construction projects. Though personality influence on team performance has been significantly investigated in other business sectors, the literature revealed that the construction industry lacks investigations regarding personality influencing team performance. The existing literature revealed that the Big Five Factors (BFF) was the most popular assessment tool for personality. Thus, this dissertation adopted the 50-Item Personality questionnaire developed by Goldberg, which consited of extraversion, aggreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. The literature also revealed several common team criteria to evaluate team performance: team member satisfaction, shared …

Single-Family Residential Flood Loss Reduction Through Freeboard, Ehab Said Gnan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The lack of flood loss estimation methods conducted on a micro-scale level that consider the full loss‐exceedance probabilities curve poses a significant problem in flood risk assessment. Also, the lack of robust benefit-cost analysis (BCA) that quantifies benefits at the micro-scale level leads to sub-optimal results, and therefore sub-optimal decisions when determining the optimal freeboard. Further, flood loss assessments focus on owner-occupied housing and neglect rental housing. These loss assessment deficiencies underscore the need for a robust assessment that quantifies the life-cycle benefits for all stakeholders and provides actionable information to enable informed decisions.

This research presents a comprehensive methodology …

Variability In The Hamburg Wheel-Tracking Device (Hwtd) Data And Results, Ilerioluwa S. Giwa

LSU Master's Theses

Over the years, the Hamburg Wheel-Tracking Test (HWTT) has become one of the most popular devices used for characterizing asphalt mixtures for rutting potential and moisture susceptibility. However, although the HWTT is a reliable standard test for evaluating asphalt mixtures, it is not exempt from variability in the test data and result. Variability in the HWTT test data and results have been majorly attributed to imprecision in the test practice and due to some limitations in the HWT device setup.

The primary goal of this study is to evaluate the variability in the HWTT data and result by investigating a …

Fatigue Monitoring Through Wearable Sensors For Construction Workers, Srikanth Sagar Bangaru

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

About 40% of the US construction workforce experiences high-level fatigue, which leads to poor judgment, increased risk of injuries, a decrease in productivity, and a lower quality of work. Excessive fatigue from working in unpleasant working conditions, long working hours, or heavy workloads can aggravate fatigue's adverse effects, leading to work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) and productivity loss. Therefore, it is essential to monitor fatigue to reduce the adverse effects and preventing long-term health problems. However, since fatigue demonstrates itself in several complex processes, there is no single standard measurement method for fatigue detection. This research aims to develop a system …

Error Prevention In Sensors And Sensor Systems, Pedro J. Chacon Dominguez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Achievements in all fields of engineering and fabrication methods have led towards optimization and integration of multiple sensing devices into a concise system. These advances have caused significant innovation in various commercial, industrial, and research efforts. Integrations of subsystems have important applications for sensor systems in particular. The need for reporting and real time awareness of a device’s condition and surroundings have led to sensor systems being implemented in a wide variety of fields. From environmental sensors for agriculture, to object characterization and biomedical sensing, the application for sensor systems has impacted all modern facets of innovation. With these innovations, …

Educational Theory-Embedded Training For Construction Industry Professionals, Hazem Jadallah

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Workforce training is needed throughout the construction industry to create and maintain competent workers; unfortunately, most construction training and education research focuses on university student education. The focus of this dissertation research is the current state of educational-theory embedded construction workforce training, how such trainings are effective, and how they may be further optimized based on established educational theory. This is accomplished through a review of construction training for current industry professionals, an evaluation of the assessment criteria used to measure effectiveness, followed by the creation of a framework for construction training.

There is a lack of recommendations for improvement …

A Framework For Augmenting Building Performance Models Using Machine Learning And Immersive Virtual Environment, Chanachok Chokwitthaya

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Building performance models (BPMs), such as building energy simulation models, have been widely used in building design. Existing BPMs are mainly derived using data from existing buildings. They may not be able to effectively address human-building interactions and lack the capability to address specific contextual factors in buildings under design. The lack of such capability often contributes to the existence of building performance discrepancies, i.e., differences between predicted performance during design and the actual performance.

To improve the prediction accuracy of existing BPMs, a computational framework is developed in this dissertation. It combines an existing BPM with context-aware design-specific …

Exploring Occupant Behavioral Intentions In Immersive Virtual Environment To Enhance The Design And Engineering Of Sustainable Buildings, Sanaz Saeidi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Accurately simulating occupant behavior is essential to improve our understanding about the future energy performance of the buildings. To date, most of the information related to the occupancy behaviors has been gathered through field observations and/or performing experiments within the lab environments. Even though these common data collection methods are effective and reliable for the existing buildings, using such data to project occupant behaviors in other contexts is likely to lead to uncertainties. The most significant theoretical achievement of this dissertation was to provide the future building occupants with thermal experience of non-physically existent environments. In this dissertation occupant behavior …

Effect Of Light Activated Self-Healing Polymers On The Performance Of Asphalt Pavement Containing Recycled Asphalt Materials (Rap/Ras), Sharareh Shirzad

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A new generation of Ultraviolet (UV) light-induced self-healing polymers was introduced for the asphalt pavement application with the aim to enhance pavements durability while increasing its service life. The developed self-healing polymer was mixed with asphalt binder using two different methods, passive and reactive. For the passive method, the cured self-healing polymer was ground to smaller particle size and then it was mixed with asphalt binder using a high shear stirrer and at a high temperature. For the reactive method, self-healing polyurethane pre-polymer was added to the asphalt binder at a lower temperature and lower shear rate compare to the …

A Decision-Making Tool For Incorporating Cradle-To-Gate Sustainability Into Pavement Design, Sujata Subedi

LSU Master's Theses

The need to continually maintain an aged and crumbling national roadway network, together with a growing demand for upgrading has resulted in major environmental and economic impacts around the nation. This has led to an interest in developing a structured framework to quantify the sustainability performance of pavements by balancing economic and environmental performance against engineering criteria. This study developed an Environment Product Declaration (EPD) based, decision-making framework to quantify the sustainability of pavement design alternatives. In this study, the sustainability of pavement is described in tandem with Environmental and Economic performance criteria. First, the Environmental analysis was inclusive of …

Costs And Benefits Of Flood Mitigation In Louisiana, Arash Taghi Nezhad Bilandi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Assessing the costs and benefits of hazard mitigation efforts is an essential component of disaster management, planning, and resilience assessment. These calculations are particularly important in locations vulnerable to multiple hazards with high frequencies, such as coastal Louisiana. This study aims to provide an improved understanding of the costs and benefits of flood mitigation efforts in Louisiana funded by federal government grants between 2005 and 2015. Project data provided by the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP) were summarized and missing values were imputed using robust statistical approaches. Elevation project cost was investigated for prediction by statistical …

Development Of Self-Healing Mechanisms For Asphalt Pavements, Max Abelardo Aguirre Deras

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Self-healing mechanisms, such as microcapsules or hollow-fibers, filled with an asphalt rejuvenator present an emerging technology that would enhance an asphalt mixture’s resistance to cracking damage caused by vehicular and environmental loading. The objectives of this study were to: (a) Evaluate the effects of asphalt rejuvenators on hot-mix asphalt mixtures in order to test its effects on the fundamental engineering properties of the mixtures at high and intermediate temperatures; (b) Develop a synthesis procedure for production of microcapsules and hollow-fibers containing an asphalt rejuvenator; (c) Evaluate the self-healing efficiency of double-walled microcapsules and hollow-fibers filled with an asphalt rejuvenator, through …

Analysis Of Cost And Energy Performance Of Geothermal Heat Pump Systems In Southern Louisiana, Claudia De Lourdes Duran Tapia

LSU Master's Theses

In the last three decades of geothermal heat pump (GHP) industry, there has been an urge to present data, especially performance and itemized installation cost, as a plan to reduce the lack of knowledge and trust towards GHP systems for heating and cooling. The potential of GHPs in hot and humid climates is significant [Tao and Zhu, 2012]. However, past research efforts have demonstrated this potential through the use of simulation rather than real-time data. Therefore, the scope of work for this research is to investigate GHP system applications for residential buildings in areas with hot and humid climates. Based …

Single-Family Housing Construction Cost In The Greater Baton Rouge Area, Justin Pierce Estes

LSU Master's Theses

Most research focused on housing costs has noted a paucity of empirical cost data for residential construction, and researchers have suggested that collecting these data for individual metropolitan areas is ideal. The goal of this study is to obtain these data and compare them to national average sources to determine how well national data represent local costs. Data collection included obtaining prices from big box stores and through a survey of local Baton Rouge residential contractors for material, square foot and assembly costs for the major components of a house (i.e. foundation, wall, roof). From the material cost data evaluated, …

Flood Damage And Shutdown Times For Industrial Process Facilities, Matthew Lane Flynn

LSU Master's Theses

The vulnerability of the Gulf Coast to inundation poses a real threat to both national security and the regional economy due to the concentration of the nation’s energy infrastructure throughout the waterways of the southeastern United States’ waterways. Mitigation efforts thus far have been qualitative and fail to provide raw, quantitative data to aid in the successful management of flooding liabilities. This paper proposes a novel approach to analyzing infrastructure susceptibility by means of a component-based approach to consequences posed by water-borne incursions. Systems are simplified to collections of components, each with a lowest-member elevation, thereby identifying the benchmark for …

Micro-Encapsulation Of Asphalt Rejuvenators Using Melamine-Formaldehyde, Max Abelardo Aguirre Deras

LSU Master's Theses

Self-healing microencapsulation in asphalt concrete is an emerging technology that would allow this particular material to resist cracking damage caused by vehicular and environmental loading. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the effect of an asphalt rejuvenator on asphalt binder in reversing the aging process and to develop a synthesis procedure for the production of microencapsulation of asphalt rejuvenators. Production parameters such as agitation rate, heating temperature and EMA concentration were varied to determine the effect on microcapsules properties such as size, shell thickness and morphology. Based on the results of the experimental program, it was concluded that …

Integrating Recycled Glass Cullet In Asphalt Roof Shingles To Mitigate Heat Island Effect, Micah Kiletico

LSU Master's Theses

As an approach to mitigate the harmful effects of Urban Heat Island (UHI), the use of glass cullet in the production of asphalt roof shingles has the potential to be employed as a cool roof strategy. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that the use of recycled glass increases solar reflectance index (SRI) without affecting the performance of asphalt roof shingles. In order to evaluate the feasibility of recycled glass for alternative uses, the engineering properties of glass cullet were investigated and compared to conventional aggregates used in the production of asphalt roof shingles. Laboratory samples …

Effect Of Different Alarm Interfaces On Controller Response, Aritra Datta

LSU Master's Theses

Pipelines transport millions of barrels of petroleum products every day. Oil and gas pipelines have become important assets of the economic development of almost any country. Government regulations or internal policies regulate the safety of the assets for the population and environment where these pipelines run. Various strategies and technologies have been introduced for monitoring pipelines, but the most common technology to protect pipelines from occasional hazardous incidents is Computational Pipeline Monitoring (CPM). This technique collects and gathers information from the field related to pressures, flows, and temperatures to estimate the hydraulic behavior of the product being transported. Using the …

Evaluating The Impact Of Lean On Employee Ergonomics, Safety, And Job Satisfaction In Manufacturing, Amanda Morse

LSU Master's Theses

The goal of this study was to explore the proposed relationship between employee satisfaction, ergonomics, and safety while implementing a Kaizen event. In order to address this goal, two Kaizen events (K1 and K2) were conducted in a heavy equipment manufacturing plant. Before and after both events, levels of employee satisfaction were documented for Kaizen and Non-Kaizen (NK) participants using the Job Diagnostic Survey (JDS). The objective of the first event (K1) was to improve the efficiency of the task of torqueing the rear axle bolts in Station #1- skid assembly. The K1 methodology followed a traditional Kaizen structure, enhanced …

Documenting Postural Changes And Repetition Among Violin Players And Their Influence In The Development Of Musculoskeletal Disorders, Cristina Handal

LSU Master's Theses

The objective of this study was to document the changes in posture and the number of wrist and forearm repetitions among violin/viola players during an experiment session to attempt to understand the development of musculoskeletal disorders. Also, the perception of discomfort and pain felt by the violin/viola players in the past and the number that had been diagnosed with a disorder was documented. Finally, possible correlations were calculated between pain/discomfort with variables like the number of years playing the violin, hours of practice/day, frequency of pain, gender, and dominant hand and among different pain/discomfort variables (pain/discomfort before the experiment, after …

Evaluation Of Methods To Operate Gate Valves Using Elapsed Time, Rating Of Perceived Exertion, And Electromyography, Francis Williams Hutchinson

LSU Master's Theses

Hutchinson, Francis Williams, B.G.S., Louisiana State University, 1989 Master of Science in Industrial Engineering, Summer Commencement, 2012 Major: Industrial Engineering Evaluation Of Methods To Operate Gate Valves Using Elapsed Time, Rating Of Perceived Exertion, And Electromyography Thesis directed by Professor Fereydoun Aghazadeh, Ph.D., PE Pages in thesis, 86. Words in abstract, 253. ABSTRACT Industrial valve handwheels are in common use in many industries to block, allow, or regulate the flow of materials within a system. Significant numbers of musculoskeletal disorders have been attributed to turning valve handwheels. The torques encountered to “break” and/or turn these handwheels often exceeds 100 Nm …

The Effects Of Lean Intervention (5s) On Perceived Musculoskeletal Workload And Perceived Hazardous Working Conditions In A Health Center Pharmacy, Jastinder Singh Dhindsa

LSU Master's Theses

The healthcare industry involves a significant level of health and safety risks in various work processes, and healthcare professionals are at risk for work-related musculoskeletal disorders and other health problems. In recent years, Lean has been introduced in healthcare with the goal of eliminating waste and improving efficiency. Lean is also believed to affect the health and safety of workers. The present research studies the effects of Lean (5S) implementation in an acute care pharmacy of a health center. A version of the Dutch Musculoskeletal Questionnaire (DMQ) was used to record the perceived musculoskeletal workload and perceived hazardous working conditions. …

Impact Of Lean Production On Workers' Exposure To Risk In Modular Home Building Manufacturing, Joel James

LSU Master's Theses

The construction industry records the highest number of work-related injuries and fatalities in the United States according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workers’ exposure to risk may be affected by implementing Lean concepts. This study describes the effects on worker’s safety environment after a Kaizen event, a Lean tool, conducted in three workstations within a modular home manufacturer: base-framing, sheet-rock hanging, and painting. The effects of Lean on safety hazards at each of the three workstations were determined by conducting a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) before and after each Kaizen. Based on the JSAs a risk assessment tool (questionnaire) …

An Intelligent Computational Approach To The Optimization Of Inventory Policies For Single Company, Qinglin Duan

LSU Master's Theses

This study develops and tests a computational approach for determining optimal inventory policies for single company. The computational approach generally comprises of two major components: a meta-heuristic optimizer and an event-driven inventory evaluation module. Meta-heuristic is a powerful search technique, under the intelligent computational paradigm. The approach is capable of determining optimal inventory policy under various demand patterns regardless their distribution for a variety of inventory items. Two prototypes of perishability are considered: (1) sudden deaths due to disasters and (2) outdating due to expirations. Since every theoretical model is specially designed for a certain type of inventory problem while …

Microencapsulation Of Self-Healing Concrete Properties, James Gilford Iii

LSU Master's Theses

ABSTRACT Recent studies in the literature have demonstrated the ability of self-healing processes to be effective in enhancing the overall life of concrete. The main goal of this project is to evaluate and to control specific parameters for the production of an effective self-healing matrix that can be utilized within the application of self-healing concrete. Therefore, the project objective is to synthesize microcapsules using dicyclopentadine and sodium silicate and to evaluate the effects of pH, temperature, and agitation rate on microcapsule morphology. The microcapsule diameter, yield analysis, and shell thickness were characterized using scanning electron microscopy. During the experimental analysis, …

Optimal Production And Delivery Scheduling Models For A Supply Chain System Of Deteriorating Items, Bingqing Wu

LSU Master's Theses

The market is varying from minute to minute nowadays. Increase cooperation and pursue the optimal interest of the integrated supply chain become a more effective way than act alone in the competition. In this research, an integrated inventory policy between singleproducer and multi-buyer is developed and two inventory models are built. The first model extends the research of Lin and Lin (2007) by changing the single-buyer system to the multibuyers one. Both backorder of buyers and deteriorating items of each party (producer’s level, buyers’ level, and during transport) are considered herein. The second model is based on the research of …

The Impact Of 5s On The Safety Climate Of Manufacturing Workers, Siddarth Srinivasan

LSU Master's Theses

The occupational injury rate in the manufacturing sector is higher than the average of all private industries, necessitating safety studies. Occupational safety can be measured through different approaches. Safety climate, a predictive measure of safety, studies the workers’ perceptions of safety of the workplace. This measure includes several dimensions of safety like management commitment, involvement and work place hazard evaluation and was chosen as a method of evaluation in this study. Even though occupational safety is an important concern, management often prioritizes reducing waste and cost. So, there is a necessity for some technique which reduces waste and simultaneously improves …