Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Economic Costs Of Low Safety Belt Usage In Motor Vehicle Crashes In Kentucky, Michael Singleton, Qing Xiao, Kenneth R. Agent

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

By passing legislation in 2006 to mandate primary enforcement of the Kentucky state law requiring safety belt use for motor vehicle occupants, the state could expect to realize an overall savings of at least $118 million in direct medical costs over the ten-year period from 2006 to 2015. Charges to Medicaid over that period would be about $34 million less than under the current secondary enforcement model. In addition, there would be at least $67 million saved in medical costs to commercial insurers, $2.3 million to Medicare, $3.3 million to Worker’s Compensation, and $11.2 million to other sources.

These savings …

Cumberland Gap Tunnel Pavement Problem, Brad Rister

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

Ground Penetrating Radar was used to verify voids beneath the concrete roadway located at the Cumberland Gap Tunnel, in Middelsboro, KY. Preliminary results indicate that several void areas reside beneath the north and southbound tunnel.

Evaluation Of The Use Of Lithium Compounds In Controlling Alkali-Silica Reactivity In Concrete Pavement, Christopher Y. Tuan, Michael T. Kelly, Mark E. Buss

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

No abstract provided.

2005 Indiana County Highway Department Wage And Salary Survey, Indiana Ltap

Indiana Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) Publications

Included in this publication are wage and salary figures for the major salaried and hourly county highway positions in Indiana. In addition, the numbers of employees working under each job title are tabulated, and the ratio of total number of employees per mile of county road is displayed. The following series of tables are divided into four categories: administration, maintenance and repair, general and undistributed, and cumulative bridge. The appendix presents the recommended methods for calculating the labor burden for both salaried and hourly employees. Also included are generalized worksheets, which may be copied and used to calculate labor burden …

2005 Summary Of Highway Revenues, Distributions, & Expenses For Indiana Counties, Cities, & Towns, Ken Smith

Indiana Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) Publications

This report provides information on revenues, distributions, and expenses of state and local governments for highway, road, and street work. Since the Motor Vehicle Highway (MVH) and Local Road and Street (LRS) Accounts are the principal source of funds for local road or street construction and maintenance operations, this summary may be used to see the trends in income sources and in the expenses charged to the funds prior to their being distributed to the highway, road, and street agencies.

Bs News

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Effect Of Viscoelasticity On Quality Factor Of Microcantilever Chemical Sensors: Optimal Coating Thickness For Minimum Limit Of Detection, F. Lochon, Isabelle Dufour, D. Rebière, U. Sampath, Stephen M. Heinrich, Fabien Josse

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Microcantilevers with polymer coatings hold great promise as resonant chemical sensors. It is known that the coated cantilever sensitivity increases with coating thickness; however, the drawback of increasing the coating thickness is the increase of the frequency noise and thus the deterioration of the sensor's limit of detection. In this paper, an analytical expression for the viscoelastic losses in the coating, hence the quality factor is established and is used to explain the observed increase of the frequency noise with the polymer thickness. This result is then used to demonstrate that an optimum coating thickness exists that minimise the limit …

Loss Functions And Framework For Regional Flood Damage Estimation In Residential Area, Jui-Lin Kang, Ming-Daw Su, Ling-Fang Chang

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

The risks of flooding damages for a region increase as the population and economy development increased in that area. Damage assessment and risk analysis are important issues for risk management and hazard mitigation. There are huge amount of data involved in the process of regional damage assessment and most of these data are spatially and temporally distributed. This paper focuses on the use of spatial data for capture of spatial characteristics of damage in natural calamities. Because it affects a large number of persons and families, flood damages in the residential area usually attract major attentions in regional flood hazard …

A Grid-Based Gis Approach To Regional Flood Damage Assessment, Ming-Daw Su, Jui-Lin Kang, Ling-Fang Chang, Albert S Chen

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

Regional flood risk assessment is the base for a sound and comprehensive risk planning or management. The regional flood loss is the sum of the damages in all the flooded parcels. The data involved in this process are multifarious and difficult to establish and maintain especially in the developing countries that suffer most often from the flood hazard. A grid-based GIS approach to regional flood damage assessment is proposed in this paper. Aggregated census data that are relatively available were used instead of the data at parcel level. An algorithm was proposed to disaggregated these aggregated census data into spatially …

Identification Of Rear-End Crash Patterns On Instrumented Freeways: A Data Mining Approach, A. Pande, M. Abdel-Aty

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Data mining is the analysis of large “observational” datasets to find unsuspected relationships that might be useful to the data owner. It typically involves analysis where objectives of the mining exercise have no bearing on the data collection strategy. Freeway traffic surveillance data collected through underground loop detectors is one such “observational” database maintained for various ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) applications such as travel time prediction etc. In this research data mining process is used to relate this surrogate measure of traffic conditions (data from freeway loop detectors) with occurrence of rear-end crashes on freeways. The results from this analysis …

Traffic Surveillance From A Safety Perspective: An Its Data Application, M. Abdel-Aty, A. Pande, N. Uddin

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Reactive traffic management strategies such as incident detection are becoming less relevant with the advancement of mobile phone usage. Freeway management in the 21^st century needs to shift focus toward proactive strategies that include anticipating incidents such as the crashes. “Predicting” crash occurrences would also be the key to traffic safety. A two-step approach to identify freeway locations with high probability of crashes through real-time traffic surveillance data is presented here. For this study historical crash and corresponding traffic data from loop detectors were gathered from a 58-km (36-mile) corridor of Interstate-4. Following an exploratory analysis two types of …

Integrated Temperature And Gas Analysis At A Municipal Solid Waste Landfill, James L. Hanson, Nazli Yesiller, Laurel A. Kendall

Civil and Environmental Engineering

This study is conducted to investigate heat and gas production at a municipal solid waste landfill. Periodic temperature and gas measurements have been taken at approximately 140 locations within the waste mass, liner systems, and cover systems at a midwestern U.S.A. landfill since 1999. Increasing temperatures (1 to 15°C/a) were observed for newly placed wastes whereas steady elevated temperatures (50 to 60°C) were observed in older wastes. Liner temperatures increased at a rate of approximately 2 to 4°C/a and stable elevated temperatures in excess of 30°C were observed after 5.5 years and under 42 m of waste height. Anaerobic decomposition …

2005 Fall Engr333 Project Assignment, Matthew K. Heun

ENGR 333

In the Fall 2005 semester, I challenged the ENGR333 students to “develop realistic designs for the wellness center HVAC system and upgraded physical plant infrastructure.”

Customer

The customer for this project was Calvin’s VP for finance Henry DeVries.

Modified Log–Wake Law For Zero-Pressure-Gradient Turbulent Boundary Layers, Junke Guo, Pierre Y. Julien, Meroney N. Meroney

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Faculty Publications

This paper shows that the turbulent velocity profile for zero-pressure-gradient boundary layers is affected by the wall shear stress and convective inertia. The effect of the wall shear stress is dominant in the so-called overlap region and can be described by a logarithmic law in which the von Karman constant is about 0.4 while the additive constant depends on a Reynolds number. The effect of the convective inertia can be described by the Coles wake law with a constant wake strength about 0.76.A cubic correction term is introduced to satisfy the zero velocity gradient requirement at the boundary layer edge. …

Quantifying The Effect Of A Vegetated Littoral Zone On Wet Detention Pond Pollutant Load Reduction (2005), Stormwater Academy

BMP Trains Research and Publications

This report describes an investigation sponsored by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP), in which DB Environmental, Inc., with assistance from Community Watershed Fund, evaluated the potential of littoral zone vegetation to enhance contaminant removal performance of a wet detention pond.

For this effort, we constructed an experimental facility at a 1 hectare wet detention pond in Brevard Co, Florida that contained pre-existing littoral vegetation (distinct stands of cattail (Typha sp.) and pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata)) in addition to an unvegetated shoreline. Ten compartments, 3.7 m by 9.0 m, were deployed within the facility, effectively isolating sections of the pond. …

Early Opening Of Portland Cement Concrete (Pcc) Pavements To Traffic, James Crovetti, Lev Khazanovich

Transportation Reports with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation

This report presents the results of a detailed stress analysis and a field and laboratory test program which investigated the early-age strength gain for selected PCC paving mixtures used in Wisconsin as well as the effects of early-age loading on doweled pavement joints. A simplified procedure for predicting critical dowel-PCC interface stresses was developed. This procedure was used in conjunction with allowable bearing stresses to establish minimum compressive strength requirements for opening to traffic based on pavement design parameters, including PCC, base, subgrade and dowel material properties. Equations for predicting early-age PCC compressive strength from 7-Day or 28-Day laboratory test …

Analysis Of Per Capita Expenditures Of Suburbanizing Communities In Maine, New England Environmental Finance Center

Economics and Finance

This study analyzes per capita expenditure trends among selected fast-growing Maine towns from 1970-2004. The ten communities studied are termed as “suburbanizing” towns. This term is used to describe towns that over the past 30-40 years have been in the process of transition from rural to suburban – in terms of their population and housing densities, their forms of government, and the services they provide, as well as other characteristics.1 Such towns are of particular interest because they have been absorbing a healthy percentage of the state’s population growth during this time period, often at the expense of Maine’s service …

Experimental Evaluation Of The Strength And Behaviour Of 16- And 18-Gauge Cold Formed Steel Top Track Systems, J. L. Dawe

American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) Specifications, Standards, Manuals and Research Reports (1946 - present)

No abstract provided.

Cold-Formed Steel Walls With Fiberboard Sheathing - Shear Wall Testing, Nahb Research Center, Inc.

American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) Specifications, Standards, Manuals and Research Reports (1946 - present)

No abstract provided.

Lextran Support Project: Strategic Planning Support For Lextran Visioning, Lenahan O'Connell, Ted Grossardt

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

In October 2003, LexTran, the City of Lexington’s public transportation provider, was undergoing a management transition. It sought the assistance of the Kentucky Transportation Center for strategic planning and visioning. This project produced four deliverables: (1) a series of public meetings facilitated by the Kentucky Transportation Center on rider and other stakeholder attitudes toward LexTran and its general performance; (2) an environmental scan comparing LexTran to similar transit providers on operating efficiency, ridership, funding sources, and other characteristics; (3) A GIS database containing census data and other information useable for the analysis of proposed routes; and (4) a PowerPoint presentation …

Statewide Planning Scenario Synthesis: Transportation Congestion Measurement And Management, Doug Kreis, Brian Howell, Lenahan O'Connell

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

This study is a review of current practices in 13 states to: (1) measure traffic congestion and its costs; and (2) manage congestion with programs and techniques that do not involve the building of new highway capacity. In regard to the measures of congestion, the findings suggest two broad conclusions: (a) the most popular measures are not LOS or volume to capacity ratios; but rather the direct measures of either average time to traverse the distance between two points, or the average speed of vehicles. These are sometimes used to construct estimates of delay during peak traffic periods. (b) Five …

Corrosion Evaluation Of Mechanically Stabilized Earth Walls, Tony L. Beckham, Liecheng Sun, Tommy C. Hopkins

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

Numerous reinforced walls and slopes have been built over the past four decades in Kentucky, the United States, as well as worldwide. Tensile elements used in constructing low-cost reinforcing walls and slopes consist of metal polymer strips or grids. Although reinforced structures have been used extensively, the effects of corrosion on the metal tensile elements are unknown. Mechanically stabilized earth walls are expected to remain stable for many decades. An examination of the effects of corrosion of metal tensile elements used to construct these walls can provide invaluable data regarding the longevity of reinforced walls and slopes. Four mechanically stabilized …

Development Of Modulus-To-Temperature Relations For Hma Mixtures In Wisconsin, James Crovetti, Kathleen T. Hall, R. Christopher Williams

Transportation Reports with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation

This report presents the findings of a research study conducted to develop modulus-to-temperature relations for HMA mixtures used in Wisconsin. Surface deflection data gathered from in-place HMA pavements was used to estimate the resilient modulus of the HMA layer at the various test temperatures. Laboratory resilient modulus testing was also conducted on recovered HMA cores to establish trends of HMA resilient modulus as a function of test temperature and load frequency. Prediction equations for estimating modulus-to-temperature trends were developed from laboratory testing to account for mixture-specific parameters, including fines content, air voids and binder content.

Estimations of HMA modulus-to-temperature trends …

Development Of Rational Overlay Design Procedures For Flexible Pavements, James Crovetti

Transportation Reports with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation

This report presents the findings of a research study conducted to develop procedures for the design of structural HMA overlays over existing flexible pavements in Wisconsin. The recommended procedures are presented in a hierarchal approach to allow the user the flexibility of estimating the effective structural number of an in-place HMA pavement based on visual and/or nondestructive deflection testing data and to develop overlay thickness requirements based on the structural deficiency approach.

Techniques for estimating the effective structural number of an existing pavement based on surface deflection are presented. The equations presented in the 1993 AASHTO Design Guide were modified …

Investigating Binder Flushing Of Sp-2 Mixes, Magdy A. Abdelrahman

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

No abstract provided.

Bs News

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Stabilization And Improvement Of Organic Soils, Joonho Hwang, Aaron Humphrey, Antonio Bobet, Maria Caterina Santagata

JTRP Technical Reports

Peats and organic soils in general pose significant problems to geotechnical engineers due to their low strength, high compressibility and elevated creep. The research performed addressed one soil improving technique, deep soil mixing, that has been widely used for treating soft clays, but that especially in the US has found limited use in presence of organic soils. The work performed made use primarily of one soil sampled on Lindberg Road (LR) in West Lafayette, IN characterized by LOI= 45-52%, LL= 327%, PL= 162%, LLoven dried/LLnon-dried = 0.31, Gs = 2.05-2.12, fiber content ~2.29%, clay fraction = 40.6%. In addition, a …

Long-Term Maintenance Needs Planning, Doug Kreis, Lenahan O'Connell, Brian Howell

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

This research contributes to Kentucky’s knowledge base of long-term maintenance needs in two parts. Part 1 presents an estimate of the average revenue needed to maintain four categories of highway in the first fifteen years after each is built or resurfaced. Total maintenance costs per mile for four types of facilities in five AADT volume categories were estimated. The results suggest that Kentucky is not resurfacing all its roads in a timely manner. Part II presents background information on preventive maintenance programs in the states. A review of the states found two recurring themes. The first was the widespread adoption …

Optimal Speed Limit For Shared-Use Roadways, Yongqiang Yang

Dissertations

Motor vehicle crashes are a serious social problem in the United States. Each year a large number of motor vehicle crashes occur and many people are killed or injured, resulting in substantial economic costs. To minimize economic costs, it is necessary to determine optimal speed limits on roadways because of the strong relationship among posted speed limit, crash frequency, and crash injury severity.

A comprehensive literature review about the relationship among posted speed limit, crash frequency, and crash injury severity level was conducted. Crash frequency prediction models and crash injury severity models are developed to obtain crash frequency and injury …

Effects Of Long-Term Wastewater Application On Chemical Properties And Phosphorus Adsorption Capacity In Soils Of A Wastewater Land Treatment System, Cong Hu, Tian Zhang, Yong Huang, Mohamed F. Dahab, Rao Surampalli

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Faculty Publications

The buildup of phosphorus (P) in the soil is a major factor limiting the operating life of a wastewater land treatment system. In this study, we evaluated changes of chemical properties, P profiles, and adsorption isotherms in the soils of a Muskegon wastewater land treatment system, which has received wastewater for ~30 years. It was found that the pH in the 15-cm topsoil increased from ~5-6 in 1973 to ~7.4-7.8 in 2003; a large amount of salt (e.g., Ca, Mg) in wastewater was adsorbed by the soil; the soil Al content (either exchangeable or oxalate extractable) decreased, while the oxalate-extractable …