Geotechnical Engineering Commons^™

Modeling And Simulation Of Damage In The Brazilian Indirect Tension Test Using The Finite-Discrete Element Method, Jeremiah C. Leyba

Civil Engineering ETDs

The Brazilian indirect tension test is used to investigate possible correlations between progressive damage and associated permeability changes. The test offers ease of replicability with a damage behavior known to lead to fracture openings as a tool for interpreting the indirect tensile strength of concrete and rocks. This behavior can lend insight into the nature of tensile damage and fracture progression in association with changes in permeability. The nature of these brittle materials is known to exhibit rapid failures in the Brazilian indirect tension test and require a method to retard the progression of damage for the possibility of acquiring …

Hawai'i Wildlife Fund V. County Of Maui, Lowell J. Chandler

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In Hawai’i Wildlife Fund v. County of Maui, the Ninth Circuit held that the plain language of the Clean Water Act provides jurisdiction over indirect discharges of pollutants from a point source into groundwater that is shown to be connected to navigable waters. The court found that studies confirmed pollutants entering the Pacific Ocean were fairly traceable to the County of Maui’s sewage disposal wells. In affirming the district court’s ruling, the Ninth Circuit held that Maui County violated the Clean Water Act by discharging pollutants into a navigable water without the required permit. The court also concluded the …

Spot-R By Triax, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Triax’s Spot-r system was developed to tackle the construction industry’s unique safety and productivity challenges, stemming from a demonstrated lack of total jobsite visibility and automatically collected, easily accessible field data. Spot-r by Triax combines a proprietary mesh network with sensor technology to record and transmit previously unattainable workforce and equipment location, activity and safety data within a defined area – all in real-time.

The Spot-r network is installed around the site and operates in a 900 MHz network, with a subset using a cellular connection to forward Spot-r sensor data to Triax’s custom, cloud dashboard. In the hazardous construction …

Purdue’S Biowall, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Mechanical ventilation, energy recovery ventilation, and infiltration (air that leaks into a building) are commonly used to introduce fresh air. These are all valid approaches, but a living plant-based filter is an innovative complement to these traditional technologies. A Biowall has the potential to improve indoor air quality while reducing the quantity of air needed for ventilation, creating the potential for energy savings. Figure 1 shows a Biowall prototype being evaluated in the ReNEWW House, a research home located near the Purdue University campus (http://www.renewwhouse.com/).

Mdp (Machine Drive Power) Intelligent Compaction Technology, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Caterpillar developed MDP (Machine Drive Power) technology to fill this gap. Rather than an accelerometer and vibratory drum, it uses the principle of rolling resistance to provide indications of soil stiffness. This allows it to perform more reliably on cohesive and granular soils with less variability than accelerometer systems. It also means that the technology can be used on both vibratory and static drum compactors, which are often used on larger sites. While the technology is quite useful on its own, it is even better as a complementary technology to the existing accelerometer-based systems. Contractors who use vibratory soil compactors …

Datumate, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Datumate is digitally transforming civil engineering processes used in construction, surveying and infrastructure inspection markets with fully automated, highly precise, cost effective and safe tools. It utilizes state-of-the-art image processing and advanced drones and camera technologies dramatically reducing the amount of time surveying crews spend in the field, speeding up construction progress checks and shortening infrastructure inspection duration, while maintaining survey grade accuracy. The intuitive, simple and automated solutions increase productivity by saving field and office time in civil engineering and inspection projects of roads, intersections, stockpile volumes, topography, piping, industrial facilities, bridges, property surveys, building facades, railways, cellular infrastructure …

Technology To Manufacture Oriented Pvc (Pvc-O) Pipes, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

The development of Molecor´s technology, which is based on the application of a Molecular Orientation process, has delivered a significant turning point in the pipelines sector. With this technological development, the company has begun to manufacture TOM® PVC-O pipes, the most eco-friendly pipes on the market. The Molecor technology enabled eradicating many of the existing disadvantages of thermoplastic pipes.

This technology delivers a clear objective; to provide the water industry with a solution for pipes carrying pressurized water in an environmentally friendly, yet cost efficient manner. This also extends a service life compared to pipeline materials currently in use.

The …

Fluid Isolator, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

The reliability of concrete infrastructure is vital to ensuring daily life, as well as commerce, can progress without interruption. From the pavement of interstate highways to the driveways and sidewalks in a local neighborhood, concrete is expensive to install and often even more expensive, and intrusive, when it needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, to maintain functionality in winter climates concrete is heavily exposed to deicing salts. This not only affects the roads, driveways, and sidewalks where salt is applied directly, but many other areas such as parking and residential garages where vehicles (and people) will track salt along with water …

Netpoint®, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

The vast majority of construction scheduling software uses a combination of spreadsheets and Gantt charts for developing and depicting Critical Path Method (CPM) schedules. While this paradigm works for the expert scheduler, it is not conducive to collaboration, and it is prohibitively difficult for non-scheduling experts to understand.

NetPoint® provides a dynamic, visual interface conducive to touch and gestural input. Activities are drawn directly on a time-scale and may be placed on the same row or arranged automatically using codes or the WBS. Such control of the presentation makes it easier to communicate the plan to any type of audience. …

Induced Earthquakes And Public Safety, Lyndsey L. Dickson

Civil Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Like the number of earthquakes felt in Oklahoma, the number of media reports regarding large-magnitude earthquakes in Oklahoma has increased in recent years. News headlines that mention property damage and question who is responsible have sparked heated debated. In this document, a discussion is presented over the responsibility of engineers for the public’s safety in relation to earthquakes. Input from various groups is discussed, the action taken in Oklahoma is outlined, and ethical obligations presented by the American Society of Civil Engineers are considered. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has reported a major grievance against building-code committees, but many …

Smartvid.Io, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

The collection, organization, and retrieval of industrial media is a pervasive challenge that is especially glaring for companies in the AEC industry. Construction projects often generate large volumes of pictures & videos from the field for tracking progress and communicating between engineers, contractors, and subcontractors. It is not uncommon for field personnel to capture hundreds of photos per week on any given jobsite.

Smartvid.io is a cloud-based software solution designed for the specific needs of industrial media. The application’s internal deep-learning engines, collectively nicknamed VINNIE (for ‘Very Intelligent Neural Network for Insight and Evaluation’), use speech and image recognition to …

Hillman Composite Beam (Hcb®), Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

The Hillman-Composite Beam (HCB®), is an innovative structural member for use in highway and railroad bridges as well as marine facilities. The HCB is essentially a lightweight reinforced concrete beam strengthened and protected by a corrosion-resistant and resilient Fiberglass Reinforced Polymer (FRP) shell.

The beam is comprised of three main components, a concrete arch (compression reinforcement), an FRP bottom flange encapsulating steel strands tying the ends of the arch together (tension reinforcement) and the FRP shell. Galvanized Rebar “shear connectors” are used to make the beam composite with the concrete deck in the same manner as pre-stressed concrete beams.

The …

Industrial-Grade Monitoring Solution: Hoistcam, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Safety and productivity are top priorities for contractors and industrial operations. Improving either makes a company more profitable and competitive. Technology advancements that can do both are important for every company to consider. HoistCam^TM industrial-grade video monitoring solutions can improve employees’ productivity and workplace safety in the construction industries. HoistCam also improves efficiency of operations and reduces job site accidents resulting in substantial cost savings to a contractor.

HoistCam™ is an integrated, wireless video system. The use of HoistCam eliminates blind lifts, blind spots and can share the live video with anyone, anywhere with solid security and easy control. …

Purdue Ect Report - Fourth Quarter 2016, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Fourth Quarter 2016

This is a quarterly report from the Purdue ECT.

Bicp Global Bim Study - Lessons For Ireland’S Bim Programme, Barry Mcauley, Alan Hore, Roger West

Reports

The Construction IT Alliance (CitA) has been promoting the benefits of digitisation in the construction and engineering industry in Ireland since its formation back in 2002. Whilst the Alliance has always strived to ensure that its members are exposed to a wide spectrum of contemporary digital tools and processes, the concept of Building Information Modelling (BIM) has dominated the focus of its activities over the past five years.

BIM can be described as a digital tool that facilitates everybody to better understand a building or structure through the use of a digital model which draws on a range of data …

Road Zipper™, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Construction work zones are growing in number around the world. The natural aging of existing roadway infrastructure ensures that more and more maintenance and rehabilitation will be required. Work zones, by their very definition, create two major problems that must be addressed in some way: safety and mobility. In the United States, highway work zones are responsible for almost 25% of all non-recurring congestion and 10% of overall congestion. Vehicle accidents are more common in work zones, and traffic congestion through work zones on urban arterials and freeways is often considered to be “unavoidable." To address these issues, ROAD ZIPPER™ …

Air Injection As A Scour Countermeasure At Bridge Piers, Ravi Teja Reddy Tippireddy

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Local scour is a major cause of concern for the stability of bridge piers and the safety of the public using the bridges. Structural countermeasures and flow-altering devices have been developed to deal with local scour. Many armoring structural countermeasures are very effective and efficient in clear water conditions but are susceptible to moving bed forms and leaching. The flow-altering devices are effective in both clear water conditions and moving bed forms, but are prone to clogging, less efficient in changing flow direction, etc. This study aims to reduce the local scour by injecting air in order to reduce the …

Lucidpipe™ Power System, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

In most gravity fed water transmission pipelines, it is desired to reduce excess pressure head to prevent undue strain on a pipeline and lower the incidence of leaks. Normally this is done with pressure reducing valves that essentially burn off this excess pressure as heat. The LucidPipe™ system converts it to low cost electricity thereby removing unwanted pressure and generating energy at the same time - energy that can be put used behind the grid or put back on the grid. The LucidPipe™ system extracts a small percentage of pressure head providing nearly invisible operation allowing water operators to fulfill …

Evaluating The Suitability Of Microbial Induced Calcite Precipitation Technique For Stabilizing Expansive Soils, Sikha Neupane

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Expansive soils, also known as swell-shrink soils have been a problem for civil infrastructures including roads and foundations from ancient times. The use of chemical additives such as cement and lime to stabilize expansive soils is a common practice among geotechnical engineers especially for lightly loaded structures. However, several occurrences of subgrade failures were observed after stabilizing with chemical additives hence engineers are in search of sustainable stabilization alternatives. Microbial Induced Calcite Precipitation (MICP) is gaining attention as an environmental friendly soil improvement technique. Several researchers have successfully tested its feasibility in mitigating liquefaction induced problems in sandy soils. This …

Correlating Interlaminar Fatigue Fracture Behavior To Nde Parameters In Carbon/Epoxy Composites Containing Voids And Delamination, Issa Hakim, Norbert Meyendorf, Steven L. Donaldson, René Laquai, David Walter, Bernd Müller, Paul Graja

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Faculty Publications

Carbon fiber composites have been increasingly used in aerospace, military, sports, automotive and other fields due to their excellent properties, including high specific strength, high specific modulus, corrosion resistance, fatigue resistance, and low thermal expansion coefficient. Delamination, or interlaminar fracture, is a serious failure mode leading to a loss in composite stiffness and strength. Manufacturing process defects such as voids degrade the fatigue life and delamination resistance of the composite. This study investigates the effect of voids on fatigue interlaminar fracture behavior of carbon fiber composites. Samples with different vacuum levels: 0%, 50% and 100% were fabricated by varying the …

Storm Damage - Murphy's Law, Dale Sedler, Mark Bailey

Purdue Road School

Examination of a disastrous event that required 4 coinciding occurrences happening that individually would likely have resulted in minor or no damage.

Full-Scale Shake Table Cyclic Simple Shear Testing Of Liquefiable Soil, Jasper Stanford Jacobs

Master's Theses

This research consists of full-scale shake table tests to investigate liquefaction of sandy soils. Consideration of the potential and consequences of liquefaction is critical to the performance of any structure built in locations of high seismicity underlain by saturated granular materials as it is the leading cause of damage associated with ground failure. In certain cases the financial losses associated with liquefaction can significantly impact the financial future of an entire region.

Most liquefaction triggering studies are performed in the field where liquefaction has been previously observed, or in tabletop laboratory testing. The study detailed herein is a controlled laboratory …

Designing A Permeable Reactive Barrier For The Remediation Of Copper Contaminated Groundwater., Christopher Walkons

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This project details the design of a sorption based pilot-scale permeable reactive barrier (PRB) for the removal of copper from groundwater. The reactive material for the barrier is the residual of coagulants used in drinking water treatment operations. Physical and chemical properties of these water treatment residuals (WTR) have been studied to optimize PRB design. Batch reactor tests have shown that equilibrium sorption of copper can be fit to a Langmuir type isotherm. Kinetic and column experiments have been conducted to understand the significance of chemical and physical mass transfer limitations. A leaching test indicated the concentrations of hazardous elements …

A Sustainability-Based Project Selection Algorithm: Socio-Technical-Economic Project Selection (Steps) Algorithm, Bharathi Bhattu

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Multi-dimensional aspects play a vital role in the task of project-decision making. Environmental effects are to be considered in addition to other technical and non-technical aspects in order to avoid undue environmental damage. This current work introduces a new decision-making algorithm (Socio-Technical-Economic Project Selection or STEPS) that is demonstrated with the use of RCA (recycled concrete aggregate) as riprap for slope stabilization and erosion control which leaches chemical arsenic when in contact with water. Arsenic has long been recognized for its lethal properties. The main intention of introducing this new algorithm is to use sustainability concepts of social, technical, and …

A Method Of Mapping Sinkhole Susceptibility Using A Geographic Information System: A Case Study For Interstates In The Karst Counties Of Virginia, Alexandra L. Todd, Lindsay Ivey-Burden

Sinkhole Conference 2015

Karst terrain is landscape underlain by limestone that has been chemically dissolved by acidic groundwater, producing subsurface voids that pose risks for sinkholes if the overlaying soils can no longer support their own weight and collapse. The western counties of Virginia are heavy in karst due to their natural, geographic boundary of the western Ridge Province and the eastern Blue Ridge Mountain Range. As a result, the Commonwealth of Virginia Hazard Mitigation Plan recommends that the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) develop a method to determine the roadways and regions most susceptible to experiencing sinkholes, in an effort to reduce …

Geotextile Tubes And Their Application To Dewatering, Kevin R. Morgan

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Geotextile tubes are a proven cost-effective technology offering speed, efficiency, and minimal impact to the environment for dewatering of sediment or sludge from dredging operations. Common applications include: removal of solids from municipal water and waste water treatment, agricultural remediation, marine dredging operations, construction dewatering, and beach preservation and protection. Geotextile tubes are manufactured in a variety of configurations.

Geotextile tubes are used for a wide variety of environmental applications including dewatering and slurry containment. One of the most important design aspects of the tubes themselves is the ability to be flexible and expand and hold form under high pressure …

Effects Of Waste Placement Practices On The Engineering Response Of Municipal Solid Waste, Jason Taylor Cox

Master's Theses

An extensive laboratory and field investigation was conducted at Santa Maria Regional Landfill (SMRL) in Santa Maria, CA to determine the effects of waste placement practices on the engineering response of municipal solid waste (MSW). Laboratory and field testing was used to determine the engineering properties and monitor field response of MSW.

The specific gravity (G_s) of manufactured MSW (MMSW), fresh MSW (FMSW), and old MSW (OMSW) was determined experimentally using a modified version of standard soil testing procedures. Effects of particle size, compactive effort, and degradation on the specific gravity of waste were evaluated. Specific gravity …

Laboratory Investigation Of The Effects Of Temperature And Moisture On Interface Shear Strength Of Textured Geomembrane And Geosynthetic Clay Liner, Taki Stavros Chrysovergis

Master's Theses

A laboratory investigation was conducted to determine the effects of temperature and moisture on the shear strength of textured geomembrane (T-GM) and geosynthetic clay liner (GCL) interface. Several landfill slope failures involving geosynthetics have occurred within the past three decades. Interface shear strength of T-GM/GCL is well documented for testing conducted at laboratory temperatures and at moisture contents associated with GCLs in submerged conditions. However, in-service conditions for landfill liner systems include a wide range of temperatures (extending from below 0 °C to above 40 °C) and a wide range of moisture conditions. Large-scale interface direct shear tests were performed …

Beneficial Reuse Of Corrugated Paperboard In Civil Engineering Applications, Gregory M. Stone

Master's Theses

Abstract

Beneficial Reuse of Corrugated Paperboard in Civil Engineering Applications

Gregory Michael Stone

An investigation was conducted to explore the potential for reuse of corrugated paperboard. Corrugated paperboard represents a large fraction of the municipal solid waste generated and discarded in the United States. Alternative applications for reuse can provide a significant benefit by reducing the volume of waste being disposed and by reducing the use of raw materials. Four civil engineering applications were examined for potential beneficial reuse of corrugated paperboard: slurry trench construction, vertical drilling, directional drilling, and controlled low strength materials (CLSM).

For the purpose of this …

Dimensional Stability Of Geosynthetic Clay Liners In Landfill Applications, Gregory R. Olsen

Master's Theses

An investigation was conducted related to the dimensional stability of geosynthetic clay liners (GCLs) in landfill applications. Multiple occurrences of panel separation of overlap seams in GCLs have been documented; however, explanation for the relative contribution of various mechanisms causing shrinkage has been limited. A systematic test program was conducted to determine the effects of a variety of conditions on GCL dimensional stability.

Effects of initial moisture content, permeant type, and overburden pressure were tested by subjecting various GCL products to wet-dry cycles and measuring the dimensional change with each cycle. Different GCL types were each tested under various combinations …