Engineering Education Commons^™

Work In Progress: Development Of A General Education First-Year Design Course, Courtney Hollar, Sondra M. Miller

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

We discuss in this Work in Progress paper the development of a new first-year engineering course at Boise State University. ENGR 180 Communication in Design Thinking, was developed in order to emphasize the importance of communication throughout the design process. Communication with the client at the start of the design process occurs in order to understand the problem to be solved. The team and other stakeholders continuously communicate in order to work toward developing a prototype to solve the problem. The ability to effectively communicate is equally as important to the design of the final product. The development of ENGR …

Correction To: Recommendations Of Rilem Tc 260-Rsc For Using Superabsorbent Polymers (Sap) For Improving Freeze–Thaw Resistance Of Cement-Based Materials (Materials And Structures, (2019), 52, 4, (75), 10.1617/S11527-019-1375-4), Viktor Mechtcherine, Christof Schröfl, Michaela Reichardt, Agnieszka J. Klemm, Kamal Khayat

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Agnieszka J. Klemm is affiliated to Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, UK.

Application Of Computational Tools To Spaghetti-Based Truss Bridge Design, Jin Xu, Jiliang Li, Nuri Zeytinoglu, Jinyuan Zhai

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

Application of Computational Tools to Spaghetti-Based Truss Design

Statics and Strength of Materials are two foundational courses for Mechanical/Civil Engineering. In order to assist students in better understanding and applying concepts to a meaningful design task, SolidWorks and theoretical calculation were used for a spaghetti-bridge design contest with the constraints of given maximum weight and allowable support-material weight. As the first step of this iterative designing process, both extrude feature and structural member were introduced to model planar bridge trusses. Then SolidWorks’ Statics module was used to run FEA analysis of the structural performance in efforts to optimize the …

Adapting The Surveying Curriculum To New Dimensions Of The Profession, Fahria Masum, Reinfried Mansberger, Audrey Martin, Gerhard Navratil, Anthony Mushinge

Articles

Today the surveying profession is very different from what it was twenty years ago. Recent technological innovations, globalization, and global land-related challenges have allowed a wide range of advances in the surveying profession. The vision is to promote surveying practices that can enhance the quality of services in a variety of tracks in the land profession. According to the new adjacent professional areas and the needs of the labor market, academic courses for surveyors have to be adapted to meet the broader scope of the surveying profession and to supply highly qualified land professionals. This paper outlines the new challenges …

Toward Building Resilient, Sustainable, And Smart Infrastructure In The 21st Century, Aly Mousaad Aly

Faculty Publications

In recent years, as a result of significant climate change, stringent windstorms are becoming more frequent than before. Given the threat that windstorms bring to people and property, wind/structural engineering research is imperative to improve the resilience of existing and new infrastructure, for community safety and assets protection. The Windstorm Impact, Science and Engineering (WISE) research program at Louisiana State University (LSU) focuses on creating new knowledge applicable to the mitigation of existing and new infrastructure, to survive and perform optimally under natural hazards. To achieve our research goals, we address two imperious challenges: (i) characterization of realistic wind forces …

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 …

Garden Building Design Project, Gena Farley, Vanessa Villanueva, Jayanne Asuncion

Building Information Modeling Final Projects

Final project from the EMGT 193/293 Building Information Modeling (BIM) course in the School of Engineering and Computer Science as part of the Bachelor of Science in Engineering Management degree. A student group designed and modeled a one-story building to house the Pacific Garden Program on campus.

Robb Garden Building, Joseph Cliscagne, Joseph Prescott, Tamara Turton, Saima Uz-Zaman

Building Information Modeling Final Projects

Final project from the EMGT 193/293 Building Information Modeling (BIM) course in the School of Engineering and Computer Science as part of the Bachelor of Science in Engineering Management degree. A student group designed and modeled a one-story building to house the Pacific Garden Program on campus.

Robb Garden Building: Revit Up, Gimelle Jacala, Colin Strong, Jason Wu

Building Information Modeling Final Projects

Final project from the EMGT 193/293 Building Information Modeling (BIM) course in the School of Engineering and Computer Science as part of the Bachelor of Science in Engineering Management degree. A student group designed and modeled a one-story building to house the Pacific Garden Program on campus.

Robb Garden Community Resource Center, Jackie Koyama, Daryll Mendoza, Kourtnie Sicam

Building Information Modeling Final Projects

Final project from the EMGT 193/293 Building Information Modeling (BIM) course in the School of Engineering and Computer Science as part of the Bachelor of Science in Engineering Management degree. A student group designed and modeled a one-story building to house the Pacific Garden Program on campus.

Operation Bim: Robb Garden Building Project, Michael White, Daniel Seif, Suman Bhardwaj

Building Information Modeling Final Projects

Final project from the EMGT 193/293 Building Information Modeling (BIM) course in the School of Engineering and Computer Science as part of the Bachelor of Science in Engineering Management degree. A student group designed and modeled a one-story building to house the Pacific Garden Program on campus.

Robb Garden Building, Staysha Delgado, Lillian Sam, Ryan Teixeira, Courtney Vierra

Building Information Modeling Final Projects

Final project from the EMGT 193/293 Building Information Modeling (BIM) course in the School of Engineering and Computer Science as part of the Bachelor of Science in Engineering Management degree. A student group designed and modeled a one-story building to house the Pacific Garden Program on campus.

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. …

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.

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™ …

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 …

Development Of An Instrument To Measure The Entrepreneurial Mindset Of Engineering Students, Cheryl Q. Li, Ronald S. Harichandran, Maria-Isabel Carnasciali, Nadiye O. Erdil, Jean Nocito-Gobel

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

This work in progress describes the development of an instrument to measure entrepreneurial mindset of engineering students. The need for developing the entrepreneurial mindset of engineering students is being recognized by many universities. However, very few comprehensive, generalized and well-validated instruments are available for assessing the entrepreneurial mindset of engineering students. Most research and educational efforts focus on the design and implementation of engineering entrepreneurship programs, but assessment practices have not kept up.1-2 There are several reasons for the shortfall in assessment practices: 1) Introducing engineering students to entrepreneurship is a relatively new trend and it will take time for …

Environmental Engineering Laboratory Development To Promote Active And Hands-On Learning, Sanjay Tewari

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This extended abstract details one instructor’s experience in incorporating hands-on laboratory portion in a junior level civil engineering class, Environmental Engineering. The objective of the change was to help students become more involved and aware of their own learning through active participation so that they can relate to course contents in a better way. The author sought to achieve this through a laboratory structure that 1) required students to reflect on certain topics and device a do-it-yourself experiment to measure certain parameters and 2) provided a level of autonomy by allowing them to choose to work alone or in small …

Traffic Study Using A Video Camera And An Image Processing Software Lessons Learned, Sanjay Tewari, Nazimuddin Wasiuddin, Marissa K. Orr

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Highway Engineering I – CVEN332, is a junior-level course in civil engineering that covers primarily traffic engineering and transportation planning. Traffic engineering topics include isolated intersection signal timing design, intersection capacity analysis and freeway capacity analysis. In fall 2015, students collected real life and local field data in two design modules and used a traffic camera compatible with the video processing software in one design module. The objective of this study is to assess if the usage of local, real life field data and introduction of a traffic camera have any impact on increasing learning, increasing feeling of preparedness and …

Work In Progress -- Does A Technology-Rich Transportation Engineering Experiences Increase Interest In Civil Engineering, Marissa K. Orr, Sanjay Tewari, David E. Hall, Norman D. Pumphrey

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper examines whether a technology-rich transportation engineering experience generates interest among college freshman students towards transportation related degrees and careers, specifically, whether it increases interest in civil engineering. Louisiana Tech’s first-year engineering experience provides relevant, project-focused education for over 500 students each year and an opportunity to introduce transportation-related projects. The six semester-hour, three-course sequence, called “Living with the Lab,” boosts experiential learning through student ownership of inexpensive laboratory equipment. In one section of the Living with the Lab course, a transportation engineer visited the class and the students were led through a technology-rich transportation engineering activity. They used …

Container Houses, Tran Joseph, Anissa Rosbaugh, Sydne Scott, Hanan Yassin

PSU High School Innovation Challenge

We have noticed that there is an increasing number of homeless in our community. People who are homeless have a more difficult time getting jobs, making it harder to for them to get back on their feet.

Homeless is defined as a person without a stable place to live, in risk of being homeless. Homeless under Federal status, is defined as fleeing/attempting to escape domestic violence. Examples of homelessness include couch surfing, sleeping in shelters, and living in a car.

Our proposal was to build homeless shelters out of shipping containers.