Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Develop A Highway Inventory Data Quality Control Scheme (Pl-26), Mei Chen, Obaidur Rahman Kazi, Tony Fields

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

Since passage of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21), transportation agencies have become increasingly reliant on data for planning and programming, asset management, and performance tracking. An efficient asset inventory database with accurate data is critical for states to comply with MAP-21 (and now FAST Act) requirements.

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s (KYTC) Division of Planning maintains the Highway Information System (HIS), which is a primary source of this information for transportation professionals at the Cabinet (KYTC). Because highway system is continually changing, it is a challenging task to keep the information in the HIS up to …

Removal Of Organic Micro-Pollutants From Water Using Sewage Sludge Based Composite Adsorbents, Rui Ding

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Millions of tons of sewage sludge, waste oil sludge and fish waste are produced annually, and improper treatment/disposal of these wastes have resulted in numerous environmental issues. On the other hand, these wastes are rich in organic materials, metals, and inorganic minerals and could be sustainable resources if utilized properly. The main purpose of this dissertation study was, therefore, to convert these wastes into composite adsorbents, and then use these adsorbents to remove various types of organic pollutants, emerging organic contaminants in particular, from wastewater and drinking water sources.

It is hypothesized that a hydrophobic carbon phase in the composite …

Kentucky Vehicle License Plate Study, Valerie J. Keathley, Andrew Martin, Jerry Kissick, Gray Forlines, Jennifer R. Walton

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

This study assesses Kentucky’s options for potentially re-plating all motor vehicles registered in the Commonwealth. The report begins with a background and discussion of Kentucky’s plate production processes, the difference between flat and embossed plates, and the structure of license plate labor at the Kentucky State Reformatory in La Grange. It details current plate production costs and processes, along with fees and production numbers. It evaluates three scenarios for future plate production: flat plate production, a hybrid system with embossed general issue plates and flat specialty plates, and an embossed plate system with in-house printed sheeting. Also included is an …

The Effect Of Plant Water Storage On Water Fluxes Within The Coupled Soil–Plant System, Cheng-Wei Huang, Jean-Christopher Domec, Eric J. Ward, Tomer Duman, Gabriele Manolia, Anthony J. Parolari, Gabriel Katul

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

In addition to buffering plants from water stress during severe droughts, plant water storage (PWS) alters many features of the spatio-temporal dynamics of water movement in the soil–plant system. How PWS impacts water dynamics and drought resilience is explored using a multi-layer porous media model.

Assessing Passenger Car Equivalency Factors For High Truck Percentages, Jianan Zhou, Laurence Rilett, Elizabeth Jones

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

The Passenger Car Equivalent (PCE) values in the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) 2010 might not be valid for western Nebraska freeway conditions. This is because: 1) Interstate 80 (I-80) experiences high truck percentages (25% to 60%), while the HCM provides PCE values up to 25% of the truck percentage; 2) the average speed of trucks are observed lower than passenger cars, which is incompatible with the HCM assumption that the free speed of all vehicle types is the same at level terrain; and 3) it is unclear whether the “average” truck used in the simulation study for PCE values in …

Us Residential Building Air Exchange Rates: New Perspectives To Improve Decision Making At Vapor Intrusion Sites, Rivka Reichman, Elham Shirazi, Donald G. Colliver, Kelly G. Pennell

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

Vapor intrusion (VI) is well-known to be difficult to characterize because indoor air (IA) concentrations exhibit considerable temporal and spatial variability in homes throughout impacted communities. To overcome this and other limitations, most VI science has focused on subsurface processes; however there is a need to understand the role of aboveground processes, especially building operation, in the context of VI exposure risks. This tutorial review focuses on building air exchange rates (AERs) and provides a review of literature related building AERs to inform decision making at VI sites. Commonly referenced AER values used by VI regulators and practitioners do not …

Factors Associated With Crash Severities In Built-Up Areas Along Rural Highways Of Nevada: A Case Study Of 11 Towns, Pramen P. Shrestha, Joseph Shrestha

ETSU Faculty Works

In 2014, 32,675 deaths were recorded in vehicle crashes within the United States. Out of these, 51% of the fatalities occurred in rural highways compared to 49% in urban highways. No specific crash data are available for the built-up areas along rural highways. Due to high fatalities in rural highways, it is important to identify the factors that cause the vehicle crashes. The main objective of this study is to determine the factors associated with severities of crashes that occurred in built-up areas along the rural highways of Nevada. Those factors could aid in making informed decisions while setting up …

The Bridge Newsletter Spring 2017, Missouri University Of Science And Technology

The Bridge Newsletter

-Bayless retires
-Lifesaving flood relief
-Asphalt expert joins S&T
-First Prakash Lecture

Center Pivot Irrigation Handbook (Ec3017), Derrel Martin, William Kranz, Tyler Smith, Suat Irmak, Charles Burr, Ron Yoder

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Center pivot irrigation has been the most rapidly expanding form of irrigation in the Central Great Plains and across the United States. The amount of land irrigated with sprinkler, gravity and drip or trickle systems was determined for all states in the USA in the Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey1 by the USDA in 2012. Results of the survey for the Great Plains States shows that approximately 85% of the land in Nebraska is irrigated with center pivots and that very little land was irrigated with drip systems in 2012 (Figure 1). The percentage of land irrigated with sprinklers in …

2017 Wheel Tax And Excise Surtax Report, Indiana Ltap

Indiana Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) Publications

This report contains an overview of the details of the wheel tax and excise surtax, a summary of the recent changes to the Indiana Code regarding the taxes, revenue estimates for both counties and municipalities, an estimate of revenue projected out to 2018, as well as some commonly asked questions and their answers.

Changes In Temporal Variability Of Precipitation Over Land Due To Anthropogenic Forcings, Goutam Konapala, Ashok Mishra, L. Ruby Leung

Publications

This study investigated the anthropogenic influence on the temporal variability of annual precipitation for the period 1950–2005 as simulated by the CMIP5 models. The temporal variability of both annual precipitation amount (PRCPTOT) and intensity (SDII) was first measured using a metric of statistical dispersion called the Gini coefficient. Comparing simulations driven by both anthropogenic and natural forcing (ALL) with simulations of natural forcing only (NAT), we quantified the anthropogenic contributions to the changes in temporal variability at global, continental and sub-continental scales as a relative difference of the respective Gini coefficients of ALL and NAT. Over the period of 1950–2005, …

Biotransformation Of 2,4-Dinitroanisole By A Fungal Penicillium Sp, Hunter W. Schroer, Kathryn L. Langenfeld, Xueshu Li, Hans Joachim Lehmler, Craig L. Just

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Insensitive munitions explosives are new formulations that are less prone to unintended detonation compared to traditional explosives. While these formulations have safety benefits, the individual constituents, such as 2,4-dinitroanisole (DNAN), have an unknown ecosystem fate with potentially toxic impacts to flora and fauna exposed to DNAN and/or its metabolites. Fungi may be useful in remediation and have been shown to degrade traditional nitroaromatic explosives, such as 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene and 2,4-dinitrotoluene, that are structurally similar to DNAN. In this study, a fungal Penicillium sp., isolated from willow trees and designated strain KH1, was shown to degrade DNAN in solution within 14 days. …

2017 Spring Engr333 Project Assignment, Matthew K. Heun

ENGR 333

The Spring 2017 ENGR333 project focused on campus energy consumption.

I asked the students “Can you construct a fine-grained, bottom-up electricity demand model that predicts the annual electricity consumption for the dormitories (section A) and the PE complex (section B) for each year of the last decade with an accuracy of ±2%?”

Customer

The customer for this project was Jack Phillips, Assistant Director (Mechanical) at Calvin’s Physical Plant.

Multiscale Mechanistic Characterization Of Reclaimed Asphalt Pavements, A. M. Feroze Rashid

Student Theses and Dissertations

The Superpave test methods are based on unmodified asphalt binders and mixes; researchers have reported limitations of these methods in evaluating modified binders. An Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) has the potential to determine morphology and nanomechanistic properties of modified and unmodified asphalt binders. In this study, different amounts of binders recovered from four selected reclaimed asphalt pavements (RAP) are blended with a virgin Performance Grade (PG) binder and tested by following Superpave tests and AFM techniques. Binders with high RAP are found to have more rutting resistance than the virgin binder but less cracking resistance due to their brittleness. Toward …

Performance Evaluation Of Polyphosphoric Acid Modified Asphalt Binders, Istiaque Mahmud

Student Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this study was to find out short- and long-term performance of Polyphosphoric Acid (PPA)-modified asphalt binders. To evaluate the binder performance, mechanistic, chemical and moisture susceptibility tests were done on PPA- and Styrene Butadiene Styrene (SBS)-modified asphalt binders. Mechanistic performance was analyzed by Superpave performance grade testing (AASHTO M 320), whereas chemical analysis was done by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) analyses and moisture susceptibility was evaluated by Surface Free Energy (SFE) techniques. Superpave testing results suggest that PPA-modified binders are more rutting and fatigue resistant than PG 64-22 binders, but use of Liquid Anti-Stripping Agents (LAA) …

Estimating Reliability Indices And Confidence Intervals For Transit And Traffic At The Corridor Level, Travis B. Glick

PSU Transportation Seminars

As congestion worsens, the importance of rigorous methodologies to estimate travel-time reliability increases. Exploiting fine-granularity transit GPS data, this research proposes a novel method to estimate travel-time percentiles and confidence intervals. Novel transit reliability measures based on travel-time percentiles are proposed to identify and rank low-performance hotspots; the proposed reliability measures can be utilized to distinguish peak-hour low performance from whole-day low performance. As a case study, the methodology is applied to a bus transit corridor in Portland, Oregon. Time-space speed profiles, heatmaps, and visualizations are employed to highlight sections and intersections with high travel-time variability and transit low performance. …

Current Efforts To Make Bike Share More Equitable: A Survey Of System Owners And Operators, Steven Howland

PSU Transportation Seminars

The number of public bike share systems has been increasing rapidly across the United States over the past five to ten years. To date most academic research around bike share in the U.S. has focused on the logistics of planning and operationalizing successful systems. Investigations of system users and impacts on the local community are less common, and studies focused on efforts to engage underserved communities in bike share are rarer still. This paper utilizes a survey of representatives from 55 U.S. bike share systems to better understand and document current approaches toward serving low income and minority populations. The …

Webinar: Improving Walkability At Signalized Intersections With Signal Control Strategies, Edward J. Smaglik, Sirisha Murthy Kothuri

TREC Webinar Series

The goal of signal timing at an intersection should be to maximize efficiency for all users. In many jurisdictions, however, traffic signals are timed mostly with the goal of reducing vehicular delay.

Other road users, such as pedestrians, deserve similar focus. In legacy transportation systems, pedestrians experience delays much in excess of those that would be deemed acceptable for a motor vehicle at the same location.

Excessive delay can lead to pedestrian frustration, non-compliance and ultimately decreased safety.

In the North American context, implementation of strategies to address pedestrian service varies greatly across jurisdictions, and there has been limited research …

The Potential Of Elephant Grass (Pennisetum Purpureum Schum), An African Indigenous Grass, In Bioethanol Production: A Decarbonization Alternative For The Shipping Industry, Lawrence Kuroshi Phd

MARENER 2017

While it is true that fossil fuel based energy which is non-renewable has contributed immensely to global economic growth, it has brought with its usage the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2), a principal greenhouse gas. Studies using business as usual (BAU) model has predicted that the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere will increase by 50 to 250% by the year 2050 with perhaps a commensurate increase in the global carbon footprint. The shipping industry has remained a major contributor to this global carbonization. Concern over this increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, has intensified interests in developing …

Effects Of Initial Aquifer Conditions On Economic Benefits From Groundwater Conservation, T. Foster, N. Brozovic, A. P. Butler

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Worldwide, there is growing recognition of the need to reduce agricultural groundwater use in response to rapid rates of aquifer depletion. To date, however, few studies have evaluated how benefits of conservation vary along an aquifer’s depletion pathway. To address this question, we develop an integrated modeling framework that couples an agro-economic model of farmers’ field-level irrigation decisionmaking with a borehole-scale groundwater flow model. Unique to this framework is the explicit consideration of the dynamic reductions in well yields that occur as an aquifer is depleted, and how these changes in intraseasonal groundwater supply affect farmers’ ability to manage production …

Bond Between Microwave Cured Repair And Concrete Substrate, Konstantinos Grigoriadis, P. S. Mangat, Shahriar Abubakri

Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering Departmental Research

The bond strength between a concrete substrate and repair patch is critical to its durability. This paper investigates the effect of microwave curing the freshly applied repair, for 45 min at 132 Watts, on the 28 day bond strength between substrate concrete and different commercial repair materials. The repairs were applied at different ambient temperatures of 20, 10, 2 and −5 °C. Tensile split tests on repaired cube specimens were performed to determine the interfacial bond strength. The ability of microwave curing to prevent the detrimental effects of freezing at early age on the bond and compressive strength of repair …

Tissue Decellularization Methods, Christine E. Schmidt, Rebecca A. Wachs, Robert Chase Cornelison

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Provided herein are methods of producing an acellular tissue product wherein the method can include the step of inducing apoptosis and washing the tissue after induction of apoptosis with a tonic solution. Also provided herein are acellular tissue products produced by the methods provided herein and methods of administering the acellular tissue products to a subject in need thereof.

Linking Information With Knowledge For Enhanced Learning, Haroon Stephen

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Learning in classroom needs continuous engagement and triggering of curiosity. A non-stop delivery of information without context becomes “blah-blah-blah”. There is a need to create a link at every step of the way in learning.

The Las Vegas Wash: Student Real-World Site Involvement, Erica S. Tietjen

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

Students from all disciplines (not just Environmental Science) can gain experience with and appreciation of their local natural resources

15-07 App-Based Crowd Sourcing Of Bicycle And Pedestrian Conflict Data, Stephen Mattingly, Colleen Casey, Taylor Johnson

Transportation Research Center Reports

Most agencies and decision-makers rely on crash and crash severity (property damage only, injury or fatality) data to assess transportation safety; however, in the context of public health where perceptions of safety may influence the willingness to adopt active transportation modes (e.g. bicycling and walking), pedestrian-vehicle and other similar conflicts may represent a better performance measure for safety assessment. For transportation safety, a clear conflict occurs when two parties’ paths cross and one of the parties must undertake an evasive maneuver (e.g. change direction or stop) to avoid a crash. Other less severe conflicts where paths cross but no evasive …

Avoiding Bus Bunching: From Theory To Practice, Ricardo Giesen

PSU Transportation Seminars

The problem of bus bunching in a high frequency service has been largely studied in the literature.

This phenomenon is produced by three main factors

(i) the variability in travel time between stops; (ii) variations in passenger demand; and (iii) drivers’ heterogeneity.

In order to tackle this phenomenon a wide range of control strategies have been proposed, however, none of them had been successfully implemented on a large transit network with high frequency services.

In this talk, we present a control scheme based on a rolling horizon optimization problem that has been successfully implemented for real-time control of two high …

Effects Of Rejuvenators On High-Rap Mixtures Based On Laboratory Tests Of Asphalt Concrete Mixtures And Fine Aggregate Matrix Mixtures, Hesamaddin Nabizadeh, Hamzeh Haghshenas, Yong-Rak Kim, F. T. S. Aragão

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Although the linear viscoelastic stiffness, fracture characteristics, and permanent deformation behavior of AC mixtures can be determined through experiments, it is generally time-consuming and expensive to reach statistically repeatable results. Thus, it is attractive to pursue alternative methods that are cheaper, faster, and repeatable in order to efficiently evaluate and predict asphalt mixtures’ core mechanical characteristics (such as stiffness, fatigue, and plastic deformation).

Chemical–Rheological Evaluation Of The Short-Term And Long-Term Effectiveness Of Binder Rejuvenators, H. F. Haghshenas, S. Kommidi, D. Nguyen, Yong-Rak Kim

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Many previous studies have investigated how rejuvenators affect/alter mechanical/chemical characteristics of aged binders. However, it has not been actively examined how the rejuvenated binders will perform for the next round of service after the rejuvenation was made. A better understanding of the short-term and long-term effect of rejuvenating agents in RAP blended asphalt mixtures is necessary to achieve more appropriate selection and use of rejuvenating agents.

Evaluation Of Thin Asphalt Overlay Pavement Preservation In Nebraska: Laboratory Tests, Mepdg, And Lcca (17-2624), Soohyok Im, Taesun You, Yong-Rak Kim, Gabriel Nsengiyumva, Robert Rea, Hamzeh Haghshenas

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Thin asphalt overlays offer an economical resurfacing, preservation, and renewal paving solution for roads that require safety and smoothness improvements. Recently, thin asphalt overlays have been used in Nebraska as a promising pavement preservation technique that needs evaluations.

The Irreversible Momentum Of Clean Energy, Barack Obama

United States Department of Energy: Publications

The release of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) due to human activity is increasing global average surface air temperatures, disrupting weather patterns, and acidifying the ocean. Left unchecked, the continued growth of GHG emissions could cause global average temperatures to increase by another 4°C or more by 2100 and by 1.5 to 2 times as much in many midcontinent and far northern locations. Although our understanding of the impacts of climate change is increasingly and disturbingly clear, there is still debate about the proper course for U.S. policy—a debate that is very much on display …