The safety of coastal infrastructure has been a concern after the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and the Great East Japan Tsunami in 2011. The western coast of the United States is also exposed to tsunami hazards due to the Cascadia subduction zone. Therefore, it is critical to design coastal...
Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is an attractive building material because it is renewable, promotes fast installation, and possesses a high strength-to-weight ratio. The use of CLT in seismic applications has become increasingly common with the development of post-tensioned CLT rocking wall lateral force resisting systems (LFRS). The CLT pier-and-spandrel system designed,...
This study utilizes probabilistic surrogate modeling techniques around San Diego Bay with an emphasis on naval infrastructure and operations to evaluate the impact of five global mean sea level rise scenarios (GMSLR). Spatially continuous total water levels (TWLs) are combined with a digital elevation model (DEM) of the region to...
Roadway departure crashes accounted for 18,275 fatal crashes in 2017 across the United States (Jones et al. 2017). Rumble strips (RS) provide audible and haptic interior alert when a vehicle is departing the roadway reducing run-off-the road crashes. Although inexpensive to install, and easy to maintain, RS are not installed...
Despite numerous techniques for measuring and estimating water depth, bathymetry in the nearshore zone is notoriously difficult to map. Dangerous sea states, noisy environmental conditions, and expensive survey operations, particularly in remote areas, contribute to the difficulties of obtaining data along the coast. Global datasets, derived mainly from satellite altimetry...
Soil instability from tsunami hazards causes substantial damage to coastal infrastructure (e.g., the damage caused by the 2011 Great East Japan Tsunami, or the Heisei Tsunami). Tsunamis are unpredictable, so it is difficult to obtain field-scale measurements. Simulating tsunamis in a laboratory setting is therefore important to further understanding of...
The objective of this study was to investigate load paths in an existing light-frame wood structure with complex geometry, using previously established computer modeling methods. The structural model is derived from an existing, multi-level residence located in Corvallis, Oregon. For the purpose of this study, the existing structure was simplified...
The modeling and analysis of laboratory-generated nonlinear intermediate- to deep-water wave fields, using existing wavemaker theories and analysis tools, is one of the most challenging tasks in ocean science and engineering. On one hand, harmonics function (sine and cosine) -based wavemaker theories result in an inherent (linear) instability of the...
The growing contamination of surface water by stormwater runoff parallels increasing urban development. Heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), persistent organic pollutants (POPs), and contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) are discharged from point sources and washed from impervious surfaces into surface waters, impacting the ecology of these systems, food supplies,...
Student engagement has been the focus of much engineering education research, in large part due to its ties to student learning. Widely considered to be a meta-construct, student engagement is often broken down into behavioral, emotional, and cognitive components. Reasons for ongoing research on student cognitive engagement are twofold: educators...
Situated cognition theory emphasizes the role that social and material contexts have on learning and knowledge application. Several studies of engineering workplace environments have noted differences between the social and material contexts of the workplace and those of undergraduate engineering education. No existing research has studied the social and material...
Unlike other industries, overall efficiency of construction projects has been growing minimally which directly causes cost overruns of projects. Though reducing idle time and increasing operational efficiency of construction equipment could result in significant cost saving, there is lack of practical knowledge of adjusting operational efficiency and integrating cost and...
Cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels have been gaining popularity as diaphragm elements in mid- to high-rise construction projects. In addition, CLT-concrete composite (CCC) diaphragms have been implemented to expand the use of CLT diaphragms. To understand the behavior of CLT and CCC diaphragms, this research effort sought to characterize the cyclic,...
Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) is one of the latest engineered wood products to show promising structural features for a variety of structural purposes including resisting lateral loads. For CLT to be widely adopted, its modal behavior needs to be fully evaluated through experimental and numerical methods. It is important to the...
In 2017, the cost of congestion in the United States was around 305 billion dollars, and city-dwellers, on average, lost 1400 dollars while sitting 42 hours in traffic jams. Aiming for better mobility and more efficient utilization of the transportation network, emerging connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technologies and their...
The goal of the first part of this project was to investigate the influence of aggregate source and entrained air on the transport properties of concrete. Currently, there are several ASTM standards available that provide systematic procedures to evaluate mass transport properties of concrete. ASTM C642-13 (ASTM 2013), often referred...
Landslides are a natural hazard that have major societal, economic, and
environmental impacts. The understanding of landslides begins with the observation that
they are a spatial problem. Spatial relationships have historically been explored with
maps, and landslides are no different. Such maps range in focus from inventory maps,
which identify...
Dilemma zones on the approach to high-speed signalized intersections have been identified as a safety problem that can contribute to rear–end and right–angle crashes. However, in situations when a pair of vehicles is caught in the dilemma zone, it is not well understood how the following vehicle’s headway and classification...
The Large Wave Flume at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory houses a piston wavemaker with a built-in active absorption system designed by MTS Systems Corporation. The performance of the active absorption system has not been properly assessed yet. This thesis evaluates the performance of the MTS active absorption system...
Wood plays a key role in modern electrical infrastructure; crossarms and power poles utilize the high strength to weight ratio, availability and low cost of wood to facilitate the access of power to millions of Americans. However, wood presents a variety of challenges as a material. In structural applications, one...