Transportation Engineering Commons^™

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 …

Mitigation And Evaluation Of Alkali-Silica Reaction (Asr) And Freezing And Thawing In Concrete Transportation Structures, Richard Albert Deschenes Jr.

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

An evaluation of alkali-silica reaction (ASR) and freezing and thawing (F/T) in concrete transportation structures is presented along with mitigation methods for slowing the rate of deterioration in concrete. A combination of field and laboratory testing confirms ASR deterioration is exacerbated by exposure to F/T. Laboratory testing indicates an aggregate previously deemed inert to ASR, caused ASR deterioration in several concrete pavement and transportation structures. Existing standard test methods deem this aggregate safe for use in concrete. A modified test method shows the concrete can deteriorate rapidly when subjected to cycles of conditions promoting ASR and F/T. Several structures containing …

Subsurface Characterization Of Flexible Pavements Constructed Over Expansive Soil Subgrades And Selection Of Suitable Rehabilitation Alternatives, Kazi Moinul Islam

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Expansive soils present significant engineering challenges, with annual costs associated with repairing structures constructed over expansive soils estimated to run into several billion dollars. Volume changes in expansive soil deposits induced by fluctuations in the moisture content can result in severe damage to overlying structures. A flexible pavement section near the Western Border of Idaho has experienced recurrent damage due to volume changes in the underlying expansive soil layer; traditional stabilization methods have provided partial success over the years. The main objective of this research effort was to characterize the problematic soil layer contributing to the recurrent pavement damage and …

Effect Of Particle Size Distribution And Packing Characteristics On Railroad Ballast Shear Strength: A Numerical Study Using The Discrete Element Method, S. M. Naziur Mahmud

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Railroad infrastructure plays a significant role in sustaining the economy of a country, and facilitates fast, safe and reliable transportation of passengers as well as commodities. Significant capital investments are required for the construction and maintenance of a railroad network that is structurally and functionally adequate. The ballast layer is one of the main structural components of a conventional rail track system, and comprises coarse-grained unbound particles, often as large as in size. The ballast as a load-bearing layer resists train-induced stresses through particle-particle interaction. Accordingly, particle-size distribution and packing characteristics are important factors that govern the mechanical behavior of …

Building Intelligence In The Automated Traffic Signal Performance Measures With Advanced Data Analytics, Tingting Huang, Subhadipto Poddar, Chris Aguilar, Anuj Sharma, Edward J. Smaglik, Sirisha Kothuri, Peter Koonce

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Automated traffic signal performance measures (ATSPMs) are an effort to equip traffic signal controllers with high-resolution data-logging capabilities and utilize this data to generate performance measures. These measures allow practitioners to improve operations as well as to maintain and operate their systems in a safe and efficient manner. Although these measures have changed the way that operators manage their systems, several shortcomings of the tool, identified by talking with signal operators, are a lack of data quality control and the extent of resources required to properly use the tool for system-wide management. To address these shortcomings, intelligent traffic signal performance …

Cement Improved Highly Weathered Phyllite For Highway Subgrades: A Case Study In Shaanxi Province., Xuesong Mao, Carol Jean Miller, Longqi Liu

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research Publications

In a cost-saving move, the soft rocks composed of highly-weathered phyllites available onsite were used to fill the subgrade in the eastern Ankang section of the expressway of Shiyan to Tianshui, China. Cement admixture was used to improve the performance of the weathered phyllites. In order to determine the best mix ratio, values corresponding to compaction performance, unconfined compressive strength, and the California bearing ratio (CBR) were analyzed for variable cement content weight percentages (3%, 4%, 5%, and 6%) using test subgrade plots in the field. Field measurements of resilience modulus and deflection confirmed that the strength of the subgrade …

An Evaluation Of The Efficiency Of Compartmented Alginate Fibres Encapsulating Rejuvenator As Asphalt Pavement Healing System, Amir Tabakovic, Luke Schuyffel, Aleksandar Karac, Erik Schlangen

Articles

This paper explores the potential methods for evaluating a healing system for asphalt pavements. The healing system under investigation involves compartmented calcium-alginate fibres encapsulating an asphalt binder healing agent (rejuvenator). This system presents a novel method of incorporating rejuvenators into asphalt pavement mixtures. The compartmented fibres are used to distribute the rejuvenator throughout the pavement mixture, thereby overcoming some of the problems associated with alternate asphalt pavement healing methods, i.e., spherical capsules and hollow fibres. The asphalt healing efficiency methods to be evaluated in this paper include: (i) standard test methods for asphalt pavements, such as the Indirect Tensile Strength …

Introduction To Signal Timing & Traffic Control, Sarah V. Hernandez, Mariah Crew, Karla Diaz-Corro, Taslima Akter

Civil Engineering Teaching and Learning

The purpose of these lesson plans is to introduce students to traffic signalization basics. Students will be lead through a series of mini-lectures on traffic control and signalization including a discussion on the limitations and benefits of traffic signalization. The lesson plans compliment a computer simulation “game” in which students act as manual operators for a single up to four by four gridded intersection. Students attempt to control the progression of signals to understand the relationship between signal timing and user delay. Through experimentation with the simulation, students generate a presentation discussing the benefits and drawbacks of signal timing and …

Broadening Understanding Of Roundabout Operation Analysis: Planning-Level Tools And Signal Application, Ahmed Buasali

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

In United States, roundabouts have recently emerged as an effective and efficient alternative to conventional signalized intersections for the control of traffic at junctions. This thesis includes two investigations related to the operations of roundabouts.

The first investigation examines the ability of a planning-level tool (the critical sum method) to serve as an indicator variable for the results of the Highway Capacity Manual’s average delay per vehicle measure for a roundabout facility; to what extent do the results of one predict the results of the other? The critical sum method was found to accurately predict the HCM average delay per …

A Simulator-Based Analysis Of Engineering Treatments For Right-Hook Bicycle Crashes At Signalized Intersections, Jennifer Warner, David S. Hurwitz, Christopher M. Monsere, Kayla Fleskes

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A right-hook crash is a crash between a right-turning motor vehicle and an adjacent through-moving bicycle. At signalized intersections, these crashes can occur during any portion of the green interval when conflicting bicycles and vehicles are moving concurrently. The objective of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness of four types of engineering countermeasures – regulatory signage, intersection pavement marking, smaller curb radius, and protected intersection design – at modifying driver behaviors that are known contributing factors in these crashes. This research focused on right-hook crashes that occur during the latter stage of the circular green indication at signalized intersections …

Everglades Drainage District: Biennial Report 1927-1928 To The Board Of Commissioners Of Everglades Drainage District, F C. Elliot

City and Regional Planning -- Florida

Everglades Drainage District report 1927-1928

Recommendation Of A New Transit Performance Measure In The National Transit Database, Fatemeh Baratian-Ghorghi, Hossein Ahmadianyazdi

Journal of Public Transportation

The frequency of incidents negatively changes public perception with regard to the public safety in transit systems. The level of safety expressed as performance measures, ensures contractors and users that a quality safety level is maintained. Both the private and public sectors in the U.S. annually report accurate data to the National Transit Database (NTD) to be used in assessing the progress of the nation's public transportation systems. Although they must provide both the annual report and monthly reports including Safety and Security data, measures are only grouped into the indicators of efficiency and effectiveness of a system and there …

Quantifying The Impact Of Truck Only Lanes On Vehicular Emissions On A Limited-Access Highway, Edward Chee Tang

Master's Theses

This thesis seeks to estimate CO₂ emissions on a portion of the U.S. 101 highway in San Luis Obispo County before and after construction of a truck only lane on the Cuesta Grade. Towards that aim, the microsimulation software, VISSIM, was used in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions model, MOVES. The microsimulation model was calibrated and validated against historical and present traffic volumes obtained from Caltrans with good results using several validation measures. It was found that CO₂ emissions did decrease between 1998 and 2012 (pre and post lane addition), but this effect was shown to …

Schedule And Cost Performance Analysis And Prediction In Louisiana Dotd, Mahmoud Hamide

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Many construction projects in the United States are facing the risk of cost overrun and schedule delays. This is also happening here in the State of Louisiana. When these things happen, it causes cost overrun which can then be passed on to the tax payers and may also cause the state to take on less projects than they normal. Many researchers have studied the reasons behind both the cost overrun and the delays resulting in private firms, developing project management tools and best practices to prevent this risk. In this research, I aim to study the historical trend in 2912 …

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. …

Exploring Compaction Effects On Cold In-Place Recycling Mixtures Using Emulsified Asphalt, Erica Ann Yeung

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cold in-place recycling (CIR) is a process that takes three to four inches of existing pavement surface and reuses 100% of it by milling and crushing it, adding asphalt emulsions and/or additives to it, before placing and re-compacting it. There is currently very little research regarding the interaction between the crushed aggregate and asphalt emulsion during the CIR process. In this study, the interactions between the combinations of crushed aggregates and asphalt emulsions were investigated along with select compaction metrics and a raveling performance test. The three types of aggregates included coated limestone, recycled asphalt pavement (RAP), and coated syenite. …

A Quantitative Model For Truck Parking Utilization With Hours Of Service Regulations, Alexis Christine Gaddy

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Continual growth in traffic volume on U.S. Highways and insufficient parking for commercial trucking vehicles has led to significant safety concerns for truck drivers. Hours of Service (HOS) regulations dictate driving and rest periods of truck drivers. When a truck driver must stop as designated by the HOS regulations and the nearest parking location is at capacity, the trucker must either continue driving past the HOS limit or park in an undesignated and possibly illegal or unsafe spot such as an off-ramp. The combination of these two variables play an important role in the safety of truck drivers on a …

The Effects Of Aggregate Size On Shear Dynamic Modulus From Torsion Bar, Farida Mahmud

Civil Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

PavementME Design is based on mechanistic-empirical principles, which take the properties of layer materials into account in predicting pavement responses and performance. Of these principles, dynamic modulus is one of the most important. Dynamic modulus measures strain in response to the applied stress, which mimics loads from traffic and the corresponding deformation of the asphalt pavement. The traditional test for dynamic modulus in the uniaxial configuration cannot be performed on field cores due to lift thickness. Owing to that, the Indirect Tension and torsion bar configuration were developed. This research will focus on the torsion bar, which requires specimens that …

A Tool To Evaluate Sustainability Of Pavement Maintenance Projects., Yibo Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pavement maintenance activities are widely regarded to be critical elements during pavement life cycle, different maintenance techniques have been used to restore or extend the service lives of pavements. However, the existing maintenance practices on pavement system have problems that impair the economic benefits, disturb the natural environment, and somewhat ignore the needs from stakeholders. To minimize these negative impacts, sustainability is an ideal way because it addresses the problems under Triple Bottom Line (TBL, refers to economy, environment, and society). Sustainability analysis within transportation or pavement industry has been studied in different countries, but the concept of sustainable pavement …

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. …

Transportation Engineering: Traffic Control Simulator, Sarah V. Hernandez, Karla Diaz-Corro, Taslima Akter, Magdalena Asborno, Fu Durandal

Civil Engineering Teaching and Learning

The purpose of these lesson plans is to introduce students to traffic signalization basics. Students will be lead through a series of mini-lectures on traffic control and signalization including a discussion on the limitations and benefits of traffic signalization. The lesson plans compliment a computer simulation “game” in which students act as manual operators for a single up to four by four gridded intersection. Students attempt to control the progression of signals to understand the relationship between signal timing and user delay. Through experimentation with the simulation, students generate a presentation discussing the benefits and drawbacks of signal timing and …

Optimizing Steel Railway Truss Bridge Health Monitoring, Ahmed Rageh, Daniel Linzell

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

Problems - Steel Railway Trusses • Aging • Large system – bridge AND railway • Labor intensive condition eval • Reported conditions: Stringer-to-floor beam connections [Haghani 2012] Stringer flange clip angle cracks [Haghani 2012] Unequal eyebars stress distribution [DelGrego 2008] Displaced eyebar pins [DelGrego 2008

Problems – Condition Evaluation • Visual inspection: Prescribed frequency Costly Subjected to human interpretation • Sensors: Focused on a single bridge Extensive array Costly

Dynamic Evaluation Of Transportation Structures With Ipod-Based Data Acquisition, Charles Riley

TREC Final Reports

This grant supported coursework and laboratory development and expanded research capacity, promoting (a) innovative learning activities that expose students to cutting-edge methods of bridge structural health and behavior monitoring and (b) research by our growing group of graduate students using developing technologies (specifically, shake tables and iPods with on-board accelerometers). As transportation infrastructure reaches and exceeds its design life, engineering efforts are turning to evaluation, rehabilitation and repair. Accurately assessing structures to determine their future performance and remaining life is becoming a primary job function for many civil engineers.

As part of this project, graduate students worked with the PI …

Design For An Aging Population, Trygve Faste, Kiersten Muenchinger

TREC Final Reports

Older Americans are increasing in numbers and addressing their needs through better public transportation design will improve their quality of life. This study sought to increase understanding of the obstacles faced by people with impairments in vision, hearing and/or mobility, which are common issues for older people, and generate physical product solutions. The research was conducted to conceptualize products, structures and services to reduce or eliminate these obstacles.

With a focus on the Eugene, OR, public bus system, elderly riders were surveyed and interviewed. Designers rode on buses noting what worked well and where problems arose. Five ride-along observations of …

A Household Daily Non-Mandatory Activity Participation And Duration Modeling Accounting For Person Level Budget Constraints, Ivana Vukovic

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A key methodological and behavioral innovative component in recent Activity-Based Models (ABMs) used for transportation planning is the household-level non-mandatory activity participation component. While traditional ABMs use a series of simple models to predict non-mandatory activity participation decisions in a sequential manner (which is often not correct), the Multiple Discrete Continuous Extreme Value (MDCEV) model can model both individual and joint non-mandatory activity participation and time allocation decisions in different out-of-home activities of all household members simultaneously. A key advantage of the MDCEV framework is that it accounts for complex intra-household interactions among different household members by allocating the total …

Influence Of Skew And Nonlinear Deck On Elastic Versus Inelastic Distribution Behavior And Ultimate Capacity Of Steel Girder Bridges, Fayaz Sofi, Joshua Steelman

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

Research Objectives

• Assessment of alternative load distribution methodologies for potential discrepancies that arise when evaluating distribution behavior of skewed steel girder bridges.

• Investigate the influence of skew and material nonlinearities (concrete cracking and steel yielding) on

• Load distribution behavior (elastic versus inelastic).

• System capacities (yielding and ultimate).

Summary and Conclusions • Influence of skew was examined on load distribution behavior, and nonlinear system-based capacities (yielding and ultimate) of composite steel girder bridges in presence of full material nonlinearities. In addition, assessment of two general definitions (beam-line and response fraction approaches) for quantifying load distribution behavior was …

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.