Engineering Commons^™

Deep Learning Framework For Intelligent Pavement Condition Rating: A Direct Classification Approach For Regional And Local Roads, Waqar Shahid Qureshi, David Power, Ihsan Ullah, Brian Mulry, Kieran Feighan, Susan Mckeever, Dympna O'Sullivan

Articles

Transport authorities rely on pavement characteristics to determine a pavement condition rating index. However, manually computing ratings can be a tedious, subjective, time-consuming, and training-intensive process. This paper presents a deep-learning framework for automatically rating the condition of rural road pavements using digital images captured from a dashboard-mounted camera. The framework includes pavement segmentation, data cleaning, image cropping and resizing, and pavement condition rating classification. A dataset of images, captured from diverse roads in Ireland and rated by two expert raters using the pavement surface condition index (PSCI) scale, was created. Deep-learning models were developed to perform pavement segmentation and …

The Effects Of Inaccurate And Missing Highway-Rail Grade Crossing Inventory Data On Crash Model Estimation And Crash Prediction, Aemal Khattak, M. Umer Farooq

Mid-America Transportation Center: Final Reports and Technical Briefs

ABSTRACT: Most highway-rail grade crossing (HRGC) crash models in the US rely on the Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) highway/rail crossing inventory database. Any errors and/or incomplete information in this database affects the estimated crash model parameters and subsequent crash predictions. Using 560 HRGCs in Nebraska, this study illustrates differences in crash predictions obtained from the FRA’s new (2020) Accident Prediction and Severity (APS) model when: 1) using the unaltered, original FRA HRGC inventory dataset as input, and 2) using a field-validated inventory dataset for those 560 HRGCs as input to the new APS model. Results showed that the predictions using …

Actividad 1: Más Fresco Que Yo, Patrick Young

Tema 4: Por favor, pásame la sal

La materia está formada por átomos y moléculas. Aunque no podremos verlas con nuestros ojos, estas pequeñas partículas se mueven constantemente. La temperatura de una sustancia es una medida de su energía cinética promedio (la energía que tiene debido al movimiento de las partículas). A medida que aumenta la temperatura, las partículas adquieren más energía, se mueven más rápidamente y se separan más.

No importa en qué lugar de Illinois viva, el clima invernal nos impacta a todos. El deshielo y la limpieza de nieve representan una gran parte del presupuesto para las carreteras estatales y locales. La sal se …

Activity 2: The Pb&J Project, Patrick Young

Theme 1: Structure and Process

Complex projects, such as bridge construction, require thoughtful planning. Project Management is the discipline of planning and controlling the work of a team to reach a specific goal. Successful Project Management requires a careful consideration of deadlines, budgets, and available resources.

The Gantt chart is a project management tool that shows tasks in terms of their time-to-complete, interdependency, and available resources. Developed by American engineer Henry Gantt, these charts were first employed in shipbuilding, the construction of the Hoover Dam, and the Interstate Highway System.

Today they are used for all manner of project management tasks. Computers have made the …

Actividad 2: Proyecto Pb&J, Patrick Young

Tema 1: Estructura y proceso

Los proyectos complejos, como la construcción de un puente, requieren una planificación minuciosa. La gestión de proyectos es la disciplina que consiste en planificar y controlar el trabajo de un equipo para alcanzar un objetivo específico. El éxito de la gestión de proyectos requiere una cuidadosa consideración de los plazos, los presupuestos y los recursos disponibles.

El diagrama de Gantt es una herramienta de gestión de proyectos que muestra las tareas en términos de su tiempo de ejecución, interdependencia y recursos disponibles. Desarrollado por el ingeniero estadounidense Henry Gantt, este diagrama se empleó por primera vez en la construcción naval, …

Actividad 1: ¡Construye Fuerte!, Patrick Young

Tema 1: Estructura y proceso

El hormigón es el material de construcción más común para estructuras grandes. El hormigón se compone de tres materiales:

• Áridos: Arena y grava.
• Cemento: Un pegamento químico que mantiene los agregados unidos con gran fuerza.
• Agua: El agua no solo ayuda a mezclar y verter el hormigón, sino que se une al cemento en una reacción química y se incorpora al hormigón terminado.

Las cubiertas de los puentes deben soportar el peso de todos los automóviles y camiones que transitan por ellos. Las diferentes partes de las cubiertas de los puentes experimentan distintos tipos de fuerzas. La compresión es una …

Actividad 1: Lo De Adela, Patrick Young

Tema 2: Por la ciudad

Si pregunta a algunos de los residentes más antiguos de su barrio cómo era la ciudad hace 30 o 40 años, le dirán que había muchos espacios o campos vacíos Si les pregunta si están contentos con las numerosas viviendas, comercios, carreteras e industrias que existen ahora, es posible que digan que han perdido parte de su comunidad, pero que, al mismo tiempo, han ganado en infraestructuras, carreteras, industrias, puestos de trabajo, valor de la propiedad y expansión de la comunidad.

Implantar más carreteras en una ciudad no es una decisión fácil. Para que el proyecto se lleve a cabo, …

Actividad 2: Ruta Óptima, Patrick Young

Tema 2: Por la ciudad

Los sistemas de navegación de los vehículos utilizan información de la ubicación para ayudar a los conductores a decidir qué ruta tomar. Muchos de los sistemas de navegación alertan a los conductores de peligros en la carretera. Los cierres de carreteras, los accidentes, el clima y otros peligros afectan tanto los tiempos de viaje como las rutas elegidas. La colaboración y el intercambio de información entre la autopista o carretera, los servicios públicos y los sistemas de navegación son necesarios para informar a los conductores.

Activity 4: High Visibility Signs, Patrick Young

Theme 2: Around Town

Highway signage has evolved over time in response to driving habits and advances in automotive technology and materials science. Although most informational signs have a nondescript appearance, the microscopic structure of their surfaces is complex. Many competing designs attempt to provide advantages when illuminated by headlights.

It is often true that designing a test to evaluate different items is as important and challenging as designing the items themselves. In this activity, students will design both highway signs and a reliable procedure for testing them.

Activity 1: Traffic Jam, Patrick Young, Peg Steffen

Theme 3: Traffic Management

Computer models can be excellent tools for analyzing complex systems. In this activity, students will use a web-based computer model to explore the relationship between the volume of traffic and the time it takes for vehicles to get from point A to point B. Then they will use the model to assess two potential solutions to their particular example of traffic congestion. Students will be comparing small samples with larger samples to appreciate the benefits of using large, random samples.

Architecture Of Heptagonal Metallo-Macrocycles Via Embedding Metal Nodes Into Its Rigid Backbone, A.M.Shashika D. Wijerathna, He Zhao, Qiangqiang Dong, Qixia Bai, Zhiyuan Jiang, Jie Yuan, Jun Wang, Mingzhao Chen, Markus Zirnheld, Rockwell T. Li, Yuan Zhang, Yiming Li, Pingshan Wang

College of Sciences Posters

Metal-organic macrocycles have received increasing attention not only due to their versatile applications such as molecular recognition, compounds encapsulation, anti-bacteria and others, but also for their important role in the study of structure-property relationship at nano scale. However, most of the constructions utilize benzene ring as the backbone, which restricts the ligand arm angle in the range of 60, 120 and 180 degrees. Thus, the topologies of most metallo-macrocycles are limited as triangles and hexagons, and explorations of using other backbones with large angles and the construction of metallo-macrocycles with more than six edges are very rare.

In this study, …

Properties Of Cement Mortar Containing Recycled High-Density Polyethylene (Hdpe), Amany G. Micheal Prof., Esraa Torky, Merna Amir

Centre for Advanced Materials

Millions of tones of plastic waste are generated globally and only less than 10 per cent has been recycled. It is crucial to segregate and circulate plastic waste and repurposing it for countless other uses. There are many ways to repurpose and reuse these discarded plastics. One use that can be examined is the use of plastic as partial sand replacement in mortar. To contribute to this important and valid discourse, the research studies the mechanical and thermal properties of recycled HDPE mortar as an active way of integrating plastic waste into the construction industry to partially eliminate some of …

Influence Of Physical And Mechanical Parameters On Cavitation Erosion And Antifouling Behaviour Of Multilayer Silica-Based Hybrid Sol–Gel Coatings On Aluminium Alloys, Manasa Hegde, Marta Mroczkowska, Joseph Mohan, Adriana Cunha Neves, Yvonne Kavanagh, Brendan Duffy, Edmond F. Tobin

Articles

Sol–gel coatings can provide anti-fouling and erosion resistance while being safe to use in the marine environment. MAPTMS/ZPO multilayer coatings deposited on the AA2024-T3 aluminium surface using the dip-coating method at three different thicknesses (2, 4, and 6 m) are investigated in this work. The coatings are characterised in terms of physical and mechanical properties, and these properties are investigated in comparison to previously obtained cavitation erosion resistance levels of the coatings. Additionally, the efficiency of the coatings against biofouling was assessed using Phaeodactylum tricornutum, a marine diatom. The influence of the formation of organic–inorganic hybrid materials (OIHMs) from the …

Lessons From Redefining Traditional Work Placements For University Students In Tu Dublin, Kevin Dominic Delaney, Norah Cussen, Deirdre Ryan

Practice Papers

There is strong support for ensuring all university students have an option to undertake relevant work placement. Work-placements enable students to engage with enterprise and develop experiential learning while linking their academic study and theory to real industrial practice. Such placements, or internships, offer students an opportunity to build their self-confidence while refining their transversal skills such as creativity, innovation, communication, team-working and problem solving. Furthermore, placements broaden students’ knowledge base and improve their employability upon graduation.

While student cohorts benefit from engaging with enterprise the enterprise also benefits, such as from the energy, new perspectives and ideas interns can …

Globally Scalable Approach To Estimate Net Ecosystem Exchange Based On Remote Sensing, Meteorological Data, And Direct Measurements Of Eddy Covariance Sites, Ruslan Zhuravlev, Andrey Dara, André Luís Diniz Dos Santos, Oleg Demidov, George Burba

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Despite a rapid development of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) for carbon removal in recent years, the methods for evaluating NBS still have certain gaps. We propose an approach based on a combination of remote sensing data and meteorological variables to reconstruct the spatiotemporal variation of net ecosystem exchange from eddy-covariance stations. A Lagrangian particle dispersion model was used for upscaling satellite images and flux towers. We trained data-driven models based on kernel methods separately for each selected land-cover class. The results suggest that the proposed approach to quantifying carbon exchange on a medium-to-large scale by blending eddy covariance flux data with …

Role Of Social Determinants Of Health In Differential Respiratory Exposure And Health Outcomes Among Children, Jagadeesh Puvvula, Jill A. Poole, Yeongjin Gwon, Eleanor G. Rogan, Jesse E. Bell

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Background Attributes defining the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) are associated with disproportionate exposures to environmental hazards and differential health outcomes among communities. The dynamics between SDoH, disproportionate environmental exposures, and differential health outcomes are often specific to micro-geographic areas.

Methods This study focused on children less than 20 years of age who lived in Douglas County, Nebraska, during 2016–2019. To assess the role of SDoH in differential exposures, we evaluated the association between SDoH metrics and criteria pollutant concentrations and the association between SDoH and pediatric asthma exacerbations to quantify the role of SDoH in differential pediatric asthma outcomes. …

The Use Of Peer Assessment And Group Peer Moderation To Develop ‘Soft’ Skills In Engineering Students Researching Sustainable Energy, Reena Cole

Practice Papers

Since the change to an outcomes-based approach in Engineers Ireland’s accreditation criteria almost 20 years ago there has been an emphasis placed on ‘soft’ skills such as teamwork and ensuring graduate engineers are not only well versed in their chosen discipline, but that they can communicate their knowledge – to other Engineers and also non-Engineers. Energy Management is a module taught to 4th year Mechanical Engineers, and the learning outcomes are best assessed by how students can communicate the energy topics they are researching. As an individual they will research an area that interests them and write a paper at …

Teamwork Satisfaction And Student Attitudes Towards Online Learning During An Engineering Problem And Project Based Learning (Pbl) Module, Sean O'Connor, Jason Richard Power, Nicolaas Blom, David A Tanner, Victoria De Brún

Practice Papers

Research has shown that students that report high levels of learner satisfaction and positive attitudes are more likely to succeed within the online environment. This is reflected in the considerable body of research that focuses on these factors across a range of academic disciplines. By assessing students' attitudes and satisfaction, educators gain a valuable affective perspective that allows for a more complete examination of strategy effectiveness. This paper examines teamwork satisfaction and student attitude towards online learning, while also highlighting elements of successful online collaboration as identified by students using the instruments developed by Hasler-Waters & Napier, Ku et al, …

The Future Of Clinical Trials Of Myopia Control, Mark A. Bullimore, Noel A. Brennan, Daniel I. Flintcroft

Articles

In the field of myopia control, effective optical or pharmaceutical therapies are now available to patients in many markets. This creates challenges for the conduct of placebo-controlled, randomised clinical trials, including ethics, recruitment, retention, selective loss of faster progressors and non-protocol treatments: 1. Ethics: It is valid to question whether withholding treatment in control subjects is ethical. 2. Recruitment: Availability of treatments is making recruitment into clinical trials more difficult. 3. Retention: If masking is not possible, parents may immediately withdraw their child if randomised to no treatment. 4. Selective loss: Withdrawal of fast progressors in the control group leading …

Enhanced Fractional Adaptive Processing Paradigm For Power Signal Estimation, Naveed Ishtiaq Chaudhary, Zeshan Aslam Khan, Muhammad Asif Zahoor Raja, Iqra Ishtiaq Chaudhary

Articles

Fractional calculus tools have been exploited to effectively model variety of engineering, physics and applied sciences problems. The concept of fractional derivative has been incorporated in the optimization process of least mean square (LMS) iterative adaptive method. This study exploits the recently introduced enhanced fractional derivative based LMS (EFDLMS) for parameter estimation of power signal formed by the combination of different sinusoids. The EFDLMS addresses the issue of fractional extreme points and provides faster convergence speed. The performance of EFDLMS is evaluated in detail by taking different levels of noise in the composite sinusoidal signal as well as considering various …

Monitoring And Modelling The Glutamine Metabolic Pathway: A Review And Future Perspectives, Zohreh Mirveis, Paul Cahill, Nitin Patel, Hugh Byrne

Articles

In this review, the contribution of NMR to the metabolomics field will be discussed—particularly as it relates to cancer and drug metabolism research. An overview of the typical NMR metabolomic experiment will be presented while emphasizing important caveats ranging from experimental design to data interpretation.

Numeracy-Meets: An Innovative Professional Development Model For Adult Numeracy Practitioners In Ireland, Mark Prendergast, Annette Forster, Niamh O'Meara, Kathy O'Sullivan, Fiona Faulkner

Articles

Despite the clear and obvious need for adults to be proficient in numeracy, international studies suggest that many continue to struggle in this area. In Ireland, one of the main challenges continues to be the availability of effective adult numeracy education. This is a diverse sector, and little is known about the varied provision of adult numeracy courses and of those who teach on them. Recent research has highlighted an unmet demand for the professional development of adult numeracy practitioners with many looking for opportunities to network and further develop their practice. This study aimed to design, implement and evaluate …

Machine-Learning-Based Head Impact Subtyping Based On The Spectral Densities Of The Measurable Head Kinematics, Xianghao Zhan, Yiheng Li, Yuzhe Liu, Nicholas J. Cecchi, Samuel J. Raymond, Zhou Zhou, Hossein Vahid Alizadeh, Jesse Ruan, Saeed Barbat, Stephen Tiernan, Olivier Gevaert, Michael M. Zeineh, Gerald A. Grant, David B. Camarillo

Articles

Traumatic brain injury can be caused by head impacts, but many brain injury risk estimation models are not equally accurate across the variety of impacts that patients may undergo and the characteristics of different types of impacts are not well studied. We investigated the spectral characteristics of different head impact types with kinematics classification. Methods: Data was analyzed from 3,262 head impacts from lab reconstruction, American football, mixed martial arts, and publicly available car crash data. A random forest classifier with spectral densities of linear acceleration and angular velocity was built to classify head impact types (e.g., football, car crash, …

Know An Emotion By The Company It Keeps: Word Embeddings From Reddit/Coronavirus, Alejandro García-Rudolph, David Sanchez-Pinsach, Dietmar Frey, Eloy Opisso, Katryna Cisek, John Kelleher

Articles

Social media is a crucial communication tool (e.g., with 430 million monthly active users in online forums such as Reddit), being an objective of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. One of them (word embeddings) is based on the quotation, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps,” highlighting the importance of context in NLP. Meanwhile, “Context is everything in Emotion Research.” Therefore, we aimed to train a model (W2V) for generating word associations (also known as embeddings) using a popular Coronavirus Reddit forum, validate them using public evidence and apply them to the discovery of context for specific …

Rapid Detection Of Sars-Cov-2 Nucleocapsid Protein By A Label-Free Biosensor Based On Optical Fiber Cylindrical Micro-Resonator, Ru-Lei Xia, Bin Liu, Yingying Hu, Juan Liu, Yue Fu, Xing-Dao He, Ping Lu, Yingying Hu, Gerald Farrell

Articles

The current global outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to be a severe threat to human health. Rapid, low-cost, and accurate antigen detection methods are very important for disease diagnosis. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) nucleocapsid protein (N-Protein) is often used as the diagnostic and screening for coronavirus detection. To this end, we propose and experimentally validate a highly sensitive whispering gallery mode (WGM) optical cylindrical micro-resonator (CMR) for bio immunoassay detection. To study the biokinetic process of immunoassay, the surface of the WGM micro-resonator is functionalized with N-Protein monoclonal antibody (N-Protein-m Ab), which led to the specific detection …

Comparative Simulations Of An Electrochromic Glazing And A Roller Blind As Controlled By Seven Different Algorithms, Hani Alkhatib, Philippe Lemarchand, Brian Norton, Dympna O'Sullivan

Articles

The use of roller blind as a surrogate for a switchable glazing in a dynamic building environmental simulation is investigated. Seven different control algorithms were applied to simulations of both operations of the blind and of the switchable glazing. The configurations compared were an electrochromic glazing and a roller blind, the controllers used were rule-based, proportional-integral-derivative (PID), anti-windup PID (a PID) and a model predictive controller (MPC). Particular case studies were examined in the weather conditions of Dublin, Ireland to make comparisons of simulated energy savings and occupancy daylight comfort from the use of electrochromic glazing or a roller blind …

A Path Planning Framework For Multi-Agent Robotic Systems Based On Multivariate Skew-Normal Distributions, Peter Estephan

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis presents a path planning framework for a very-large-scale robotic (VLSR) system in an known obstacle environment, where the time-varying distributions of agents are applied to represent the multi-agent robotic system (MARS). A novel family of the multivariate skew-normal (MVSN) distributions is proposed based on the Bernoulli random field (BRF) referred to as the Bernoulli-random-field based skew-normal (BRF-SN) distribution. The proposed distributions are applied to model the agents’ distributions in an obstacle-deployed environment, where the obstacle effect is represented by a skew function and separated from the no-obstacle agents’ distributions. First, the obstacle layout is represented by a Hilbert …

The Simulation Of Elastic Wave Propagation In Presence Of Void In The Subsurface, Brittany Ballengee

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Underground voids, whether man-made (e.g., mines and tunnels) or naturally occurring (e.g., karst terrain), can cause a variety of threats to surface activity. Therefore, it is important to be able to locate and characterize a potential void in the subsurface so that mitigating measures can be taken. In real-world environments, the subsurface properties and the existence of a void is not known, so the problem is challenging to solve. The numerical analysis conducted in this study takes a step toward understanding the seismic response with and without a void in various types of domains. The Finite Difference Method (FDM) and …

Special Collections As Muse: The Use Of Rare Books And Archives To Inspire Creative Works, Tracy Grimm, Adriana Harmeyer

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The unique and varied collections held by archives and special collections within many academic libraries offer fertile ground for the creative endeavors of students, faculty, and professional artists. This chapter explores direct and indirect methods librarians and archivists may engage creators with primary source materials. Academic libraries do not necessarily need to build art-focused collections in order to support the research of creators. More than subject content, successful engagement with creators is developed by means of collaborative relationships with arts faculty, artists, and galleries to reach student creators and introduce concepts of primary source research as a source of inspiration. …

Euniwell: Maximising Academic And Social Outcomes In Engineering Education, Neil Cooke, S Chung, Kim Hawwash, D Cottle, E Caporali, G Bartoli, J Forss, J Andersson, P Chargé

Practice Papers

The ERASMUS+ European University for Well-Being (EUniWell) alliance’s mission aims to resolve the paradox of Europeans’ relative prosperity against the global security and sustainability challenge. “Maximising Academic and Social Outcomes in Engineering Education” is a project which interprets this contradiction for engineering educators; how to best teach non-technical skills to ensure engineers make the utmost contribution to societal wellbeing? Appreciably, the social outcome for the person who becomes an engineer is positive because the profession is relatively well-paid. Therefore, engineering education is good for social mobility providing the learning environment narrows attainment gaps between disadvantaged and mainstream cohorts. Accordingly, our …