Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Engineering Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Our Legacy Of Neglect: The Longfellow Bridge And The Cost Of Deferred Maintenance, David Westerling, Steve Poftak Jul 2007

Our Legacy Of Neglect: The Longfellow Bridge And The Cost Of Deferred Maintenance, David Westerling, Steve Poftak

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

The Longfellow Bridge, connecting Boston and Cambridge, is in bad shape, due not only to its age and the ravages of our weather, but also to a troubling and persistent lack of maintenance. Fixing the bridge, in effect paying the bill for our unwillingness to maintain it, is estimated to cost at least $180 million, with the potential for cost overruns reaching into the hundreds of millions. The neglect of the Longfellow Bridge is symptomatic of a problem that encompasses almost all the assets owned by the Commonwealth.


A Hybrid First Year Science Course For Engineering Students – Integrating Biology With Chemistry, David Harding, Pauline Schwartz, Jean Nocito-Gobel, Agamemnon Koutsospyros Jun 2007

A Hybrid First Year Science Course For Engineering Students – Integrating Biology With Chemistry, David Harding, Pauline Schwartz, Jean Nocito-Gobel, Agamemnon Koutsospyros

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

Biology is playing an increasingly important role in many engineering fields. With the typical engineering program already having a high credit hour requirement, the question becomes, how to best integrate biology concepts into a packed engineering curriculum. A typical biology course is not likely to introduce the important concepts of biology to engineering students. The solution here is to develop a hybrid course that integrates chemistry and biology. In the course, Chemistry with Applications to Biosystems, the concept is to develop a course that integrally links important concepts of chemistry and biology. The course focuses on the areas of biology …


Operations-Oriented Performance Measures For Freeway Management Systems: Year 1 Report, Robert E. Brydia, William H. Schneider, Stephen P. Mattingly, Melanie L. Sattler, Auttawit Upayokin Apr 2007

Operations-Oriented Performance Measures For Freeway Management Systems: Year 1 Report, Robert E. Brydia, William H. Schneider, Stephen P. Mattingly, Melanie L. Sattler, Auttawit Upayokin

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

This report describes the year 1 activities on the project titled “Using Operations-Oriented Performance Measures to Support Freeway Management Systems.” Work activities included a comprehensive statewide survey on the use of performance measurement, as well as the initial recommendation on both operations and emissions-oriented performance measures to use in support of daily operations.


A Weighted Residual Parabolic Acceleration Time Integration Method For Problems In Structural Dynamics, Ali Abolmaali, S.H. Razavi, M. Ghassemieh Jan 2007

A Weighted Residual Parabolic Acceleration Time Integration Method For Problems In Structural Dynamics, Ali Abolmaali, S.H. Razavi, M. Ghassemieh

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

In the proposed method, the variation of displacement in each time step is assumed to be a fourth order polynomial in time and its five unknown coefficients are calculated based on: two initial conditions from the previous time step; satisfying the equation of motion at both ends of the time step; and the zero weighted residual within the time step. This method is non-dissipative and its dispersion is considerably less than in other popular methods. The stability of the method shows that the critical time step is more than twice of that for the linear acceleration method and its convergence …