Wave energy has the potential to power large and small factions of economies around the world alike. Current methods for determining the amount of wave energy resource available to wave energy converter (WEC) devices entail capturing the look of the sea state at large by presenting characteristic wave heights, periods,...
A curb ramp is an indispensable ramp system in the transportation network that provides a transition between a sidewalk and a roadway. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that the design, construction, and maintenance of curb ramps meet the ADA standards. However, many existing curb ramps are noncompliant, as...
Vulnerable road users, anyone interacting with the roadway facility without the protection of an automobile, experience greater risk for more severe crash outcomes. Multimodal roadway facilities often times provide less separation and more points of conflict between different types of road users. To promote vulnerable road user safety, transportation agencies...
The seismic response of deep deposits of liquefiable and cyclic-softening susceptible soils has presented the geotechnical profession with significant engineering challenges. Strong ground motions may serve to soften soils under cyclic shear, trigger liquefaction, and produce damaging displacements as a consequence. This study improves the understanding of the in-situ, nonlinear,...
Engineering education research has led to a greater understanding of the gap in preparedness of students for the engineering industry. Multiple studies comparing the workplace and academic contexts and the participants in those contexts (i.e., students, faculty, and engineering practitioners) have emphasized similarities and differences between the two contexts by...
Passenger security screening is a continuously evolving process and not much is known about how passengers perceive its effectiveness in keeping air travel safe. The provided thesis consists of two manuscripts that expand the literature on passenger perception of safety through the application of advanced econometric techniques. This thesis aims...
This thesis builds on a modeling tool that has been developed to link thermodynamic modeling and concrete performance. This tool is intended to predict the performance for modern concrete mixtures made with ordinary portland cement (OPC), conventional and novel supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), and limestone (Ls). The first part of...
The outbreak of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the restrictions implemented in response to it (e.g., stay-at-home orders, social distancing mandates, business closures) had unprecedented effects on the trucking industry. The pandemic prompted the first significant overhaul of federal hours-of-service (HOS) regulations in over 15 years. Prior to the...
The pozzolanic reactivity test (PRT) is used to quantify the pozzolanic reactivity of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). The PRT computes reactivity by measuring heat release (Q) and calcium hydroxide (CH) consumption, as interpreted using thermodynamic modeling. The robustness of PRT is examined by experimentally varying CH-to-SCM ratio, solution-to-solid ratio, sulfate...
Considering the deadly impacts of commercial motor vehicle (CMV) crashes on road safety, many previous studies have put in efforts to find the determinants of CMV crash injury severities. However, studies examining the impact of the different number of lanes on CMV crash
injury severities are lacking. Besides, the importance...
In the construction industry, people seek to deliver a successful project. The major success performance measurements in the construction industry are cost, time, and quality. Several researchers have determined critical success factors for construction projects, and one of these critical success factors was management actions. Furthermore, there is an inadequacy...
While the use of powered mobility devices for young children with mobility challenges has taken off in recent years following evidence that the use of powered mobility at a young age augments other traditional mobility skill interventions, the research is still limited and focuses on physical impacts more. Recently, the...
Timber-concrete composite (TCC) floors have improved strength and stiffness when compared to timber-only floors, allowing for longer spans in buildings and improved life safety. However, North America does not have codes and standards that recognize TCC floors, particularly the improved life safety performance of these floors in fire. Therefore, alternate...
This thesis focuses on the fundamental behavior of CLT floor-to-wall connections during a fire.
Cross-laminated timber (CLT) panelized structures rely on floor-to-wall connections for the load path and stability of the structure. Additionally, the fire performance of these connections is critical to prevent horizontal or vertical fire spread within these...
Sediment convergence and divergence zones create subaqueous morphological features that range from ripples O (cm) to coastlines O (km). However, there is a gap in knowledge associated with quantifying the contribution of small-scale ripple mobility to the evolution of large-scale morphology. To address this gap, we investigate how small-scale ripples...
A variety of stakeholders require information about marine systems. In the open ocean, pilots of marine vessels require knowledge about environmental conditions for safe passage and route planning. On the coastline, communities rely on information about nearshore dynamics to increase safety from coastal hazards such as nearshore pollutants, coastal erosion,...
Reducing the CO2 emitted by the production of cement can greatly reduce the carbon emissions attributable to the built industry. By specifying concrete mixes with lower global warming potentials (GWPs), structural engineers can reduce the carbon emissions of concrete used in the built industry. This thesis uses a cradle-to-gate life...
The constitutive behavior of high-performance fiber-reinforced cementitious composites (HPFRCCs) under mechanical loading is characterized by significant tensile properties that play an essential role in the structural response of several applications in structural engineering. The significance of tensile properties of HPFRCCs in structural engineering is the focus of three manuscripts presented...
Timber-concrete composite (TCC) solutions originated in the early twentieth century. There has been a renewed interest in TCC solutions in modern mass timber buildings, especially for floor systems. However due to lack of data, design standards, and code acceptance, TCC solutions require that new mass timber solutions be tested, and...
Asphalt pavements constitute more than ninety percent of the nation’s roadway network. Besides serving the key role of providing a smooth and durable all-weather surface that benefits a range of users, they are also the lifelines of the nation and the world and contribute tremendously towards economic and social development....
Wildland urban interface (WUI) communities in the Western United States have recently dealt with historic and devastating wildfires year after year. The fires have cost tens of billions in damage, burned tens of thousands of structures, displaced thousands of residents, and killed over one hundred people. The 2017 Tubbs fire...
There are many existing bridges around the world that were designed without consideration for seismic effects. Many of these bridges were designed before modern earthquake engineering design standards and practices existed and thus are expected to perform poorly during strong ground shaking. Common structural deficiencies are found in their reinforced...
Nonlinear response history analysis (NRHA) is increasingly becoming more accessible and prevalent in research and practice. As the accuracy of the NRHA results depends on the ground motion characteristics and the robustness of the numerical model, research has focused on the development of guidance for performance-based seismic design and assessment...
The rapid growth in the number of roundabouts raises some significant research challenges, especially around safety performance and evaluation in the U.S. Despite the safety advantages that roundabout geometric design brings, crashes still occur. While operationally roundabouts are good at preventing severe crashes, they may lead to more less severe...
While safety improvements have been made in the construction industry, construction still experiences one of the highest numbers of fatalities annually compared to other industries in the United States with over 970 fatalities in 2016 alone. This number of fatalities drives researchers and safety managers to improve safety measures and...
When pavement markings on roadways are removed, scarring can occur leaving behind traces of where the marking used to be called ghost lines. These ghost lines can confuse drivers on the roadway and divert their attention from the correct lane markings leading them into the false lane. Previous research has...
Climate change has pervasive impacts on Earth’s diverse ecosystems. Observed and projected effects that impact coastal environments pose unique challenges. Coastal regions provide numerous ecosystem services (e.g., fisheries, nursery habitats, erosion control, and water filtering and detoxification), house 40% of the US population, and contribute to 58% of the national...
The use of remote sensing techniques in coastal science and engineering has rapidly increased in the past few decades. This dissertation outlines new remote sensing tools using two remote sensing technologies (lidar and X-band marine radar) along with two nearshore hydrodynamic and morphodynamic analyses supported or motivated by these remote...
Reliability-based geotechnical foundation design focusses on soil and structure analysis that meets necessary safety, performance and/or serviceability criteria, calibrated based on probabilistic analyses and an accepted level of risk. As the civil engineering community seeks to better harmonize geotechnical and structural design methodologies, reliability-based design is being incorporated more into...
The likelihood of a Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) earthquake is estimated between 37 to 42% in the next 50 years, leading to strong shaking, liquefaction, landsliding, and other seismic ground failure resulting in major impacts to critical lifelines such as the western power grid. Electrical power is essential for continued...
The Cone Penetration Test (CPT) has been widely-adopted for rapid, cost-effective exploration of the subsurface and reduction in the effort associated with drilling, sampling, and laboratory testing of soil. The adoption of the CPT has stemmed in part to the correlation of measurements to preliminary soil classification, stress history, drained...
Centerline rumble strips (CLRS) have proven to be a cost-effective safety measure in reducing lane departure crashes. However, there are often unintended consequences associated with the installation of CLRS, particularly in rural mountainous areas or snow zones. These consequences include the accumulation of water and ice on the roadway and...
Most of the concrete in the world is produced using hydraulic cement (ordinary portland cement, OPC) and siliceous or alumino-siliceous supplementary cementitious materials (SCM). Due to the shift in focus toward environmental sustainability within the construction industry, alkali-activated cementitious systems (AAC) have gained significant attention to reduce the carbon footprint...
The coastal region is home to many types of surface fronts that exist on a submesoscale (1-10 $km$). While in situ observations capture point or transect observations of frontal behavior subsurface, their complex spatial patterns can be well-captured using remote sensing techniques, which provide synoptic views of the ocean surface...
Coastal dunes provide a diverse set of ecosystem services including coastal protection against destructive surge and waves during storm events. Dunes are constantly evolving through various stages of response to storm events and post-storm recovery at rates that vary due to a range of drivers including pre-existing morphology, environmental forcing...
The use of natural and nature-based features for coastal hazard mitigation, particularly emergent vegetation such as mangrove forests, have become increasingly popular. However, the protection that these systems can provide has not been fully quantified for engineering design, and the uncertainties in parameterized equations have not been fully defined. In...
This study focuses specifically on the investigation of a new, inexpensive geophone system and its application to monitor wave activity. Studies of seismic observations of coastal cliffs suggest that ground motions generated from local ocean waves may provide a surrogate to limited wave buoy data to quantify the wave contact...
As e-commerce and urban deliveries spike, there is an increasing demand for curbside loading/unloading space. However, commercial vehicle drivers face numerous challenges while navigating dense urban road networks. Previous literature on the topic of how commercial vehicle drivers make choices about when and where to park is scarce, and data...
Wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities, where forested land boundaries or intermixes with infrastructure, are quickly growing in the US. WUI communities have grown substantially from 1990 to 2010, with an increase of 12.7 million houses and 25 million people. Wildfires encroaching on WUI communities can cause damage to both above ground...
Traditional braced frames are an efficient and economic means of resisting seismic demands. However, braced frames are prone to story mechanisms, which can result in concentrations of demands and damage during seismic events. Including steel strongbacks in conjunction with traditional braced frames can mitigate story mechanisms. The SBF results in...
A physical model study was performed to examine the forces and response of 1:6 scale wood-frame coastal residential structures subjected to storm surge and waves. An on-grade and an elevated specimen were tested and exposed to regular waves with varying water depths and wave heights to simulate Hurricane Sandy’s conditions....
To facilitate the design of Natural and Nature-Based Features (NNBF) for flood protection, this thesis expands an existing engineering design methodology to NNBF systems. The existing approach is a Level III reliability method for the performance-based design of traditional coastal engineering systems. The expanded methodology incorporates uncertainties inherent to both...
Highway work zones are extremely dangerous environments due to the presence of workers near high-speed traveling vehicles. This dynamic environment results in a disproportionate number of accidents that cause injury and casualty to both drivers and workers due primarily to vehicular intrusions into work zones. Several emerging work zone intrusion...
A typhoon is a highly destructive weather event, causing severe damage and losses to the economy and lives. The impacts of typhoons can be mitigated by adequately predicting their path in advance. The progress of a typhoon can be investigated by analyzing the significant changes in Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV)...
Wind flow on vegetated coastal foredunes adapts to the local canopy drag, resulting in spatial gradients in bed shear stresses which contribute to the formation of localized bedforms (e.g., nebkha, shadow dunes). Numerous morphological properties of the plants, including canopy height and density, affect the wind flow dynamics and therefore...
Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) has been of significant research interest worldwide over the past several decades because of its variety of applications in both offshore and coastal engineering. Researchers analyzing FSI systems rely heavily on experimental tests in model scale in laboratories or large-scale sea trials. However, these tests are often...
Steel moment-resisting frames (MRFs) are widely used in the United States to resist seismic forces. MRFs have many advantages, including architectural versatility, vetted member and connection detailing requirements, and high ductility for special MRFs (SMRF). However, MRFs require large members to meet story drift criteria. Moreover, strong-column-weak-beam requirements can result...
Coastal landslides and erosion are major natural hazards resulting in unstable slopes, constituting immense challenges to modern infrastructure. Developing, maintaining, and performing risk assessments of infrastructure on, or close to, these hazards require a detailed understanding of the geophysical processes destabilizing the slope. These efforts start with the collection of...
Imagery acquired from unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and processed with structure from motion (SfM) – multi-view stereo (MVS) algorithms provides transformative new capabilities for surveying and mapping. Together, these new tools are leading to a democratization of airborne surveying and mapping by enabling similar capabilities (including similar or better accuracies,...
Nearly 24% of Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) containing military munitions are in the nearshore coastal zone with approximately 30% of those sites containing heterogeneous sediment compositions of gravel-sand. Previous exploration in munition mobility was performed on beaches of sandy or muddy bottoms leaving the influence of heterogeneous sediment properties...
The coast of Oregon is highly dynamic, with beach and dune morphodynamics constantly evolving in response to physical and ecological forcing at scales ranging from seconds to decades and meters to tens of kilometers. Evaluating spatial and temporal trends in shoreline evolution is paramount in understanding and eventually developing a...
Mass timber is emerging as a viable form of construction around the world in new markets for wood buildings. The entrance into these markets has driven the demand for more knowledge to enable designs alongside other structural materials such as steel and reinforced concrete.
Large, in-plane tests on cross-laminated timber...
While primary use of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), various GNSS applications have emerged over the past decades that includes GNSS meteorology. GNSS meteorology is the remote sensing of the atmospheric constituents in the neutral atmosphere – mostly in the troposphere - using GNSS...
Conflicts and disasters displace millions of populations worldwide. There is a need for rapid and affordable housing to cater to the needs of the displaced and unhoused population. Experience from previous post-disaster responses shows that temporary housing should be rapidly deployable, planned for months to years, and should be environmentally...
Wildfires are a recurring disaster that threatens communities living close to forests and result in significant financial losses along with negative environmental effects, especially with the increase of wildfire season length and intensity due to climate change and increasing urbanization. Wildfire events can also have a significant impact on the...
A vital aspect of concrete construction is quality assurance and control (QA/QC). Engineered structures must meet pre-determined and agreed-upon strength and durability requirements. Concrete falls into a specific category of infrastructure material because in most cases, these strength and durability requirements cannot be found until the material has at least...
Design of Geosynthetic-Reinforced Soil Structures (GRSS) require sufficient rear pullout anchoring capacity in order to maintain internal stability. Length requirements are amplified when reinforcement coverage ratios or seismicity is considered, potentially resulting in uneconomical GRSS design lengths. This study describes the influence of reinforcement length, coverage ratio, and pseudostatic seismic...
Tsunami inundation of coastal communities can impose a wide array of forces on the
built environment. Forces generated by tsunami-driven debris damming have the potential to
cause failure of coastal structures and further accumulate flow-entrained debris. Since tsunami-resilient design standards were adopted by ASCE in 2016, debris damming considerations have...
Civil engineers frequently use lime to improve the mechanical properties of weak clayey soils. The production of lime is associated with significant CO₂ emissions. Sequestering carbon dioxide into the stabilized soil can effectively reduce the carbon footprint of the lime. In the presence of CO₂, unreacted lime in the stabilized...
Lean construction and construction industrialization have been the focus of the construction industry in recent decades. Lean construction has been shown to reduce waste and uncertainty, and construction industrialization has a positive effect on improving efficiency and safety. Research on lean construction shows that lean construction practices are recognized by...
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) at varying market penetrations will change traffic flow and highway performance. At AV market penetrations between 0% and 100%, human driven vehicles (HVs) will be interacting with AVs. However, little is known about how HVs interact with AVs. This study attempts to quantify HV headways when following...
To ensure the safety of the nation’s bridges, the National Bridge Inspection Standards (NBIS) require all bridges to undergo routine load rating analyses to assess their structural capacity. Accurate geometric information for each structure is necessary for load rating analyses. This information is typically ascertained from as-built plans. Still, when...
The issue of chloride-induced corrosion of reinforcing steel in concrete and its economic impacts are well-known. Chlorides that cause reinforcement corrosion can be from constituent materials used to prepare concrete or can enter the hardened concrete when the structure is exposed to chloride environments. To minimize the risk of reinforcement...
Post-tensioned (PT) self-centering shear walls were designed to reduce structural damage from seismic activity. However, these lateral force resistant systems experience post-tension loss negatively affecting the re-centering capability due to delayed deformations experienced by engineered wood products over time. The long-term mechanical response of mass-timber panels to in-plane PT loads...
The tack coat bond is known to affect the longevity of asphalt pavements. Proper interlayer bonding prevents successive pavement layers from acting independently of one another and creating non-uniform stress and strain profiles in the pavement structure. Poor bonding between pavement layers can result in various pavement failures such as...
The resistance of asphalt concrete pavement to distresses such as fatigue cracking and permanent deformation is governed by how well the structure can resist loading under a variety of traffic and climate-related conditions. Asphalt binder type and content are typically the variables that pavement engineers can manipulate to render the...
This work analyzes the numerical curvature of buckling braces. An existing brace modeling learning tool, which in its current state allows users to change the inputs within a simulated model of a braced element, was modified to display the curvature diagram. The curvature diagram was verified through comparison to existing...
Projects in forestry and civil engineering depend on accurate information, which is often acquired through remote sensing techniques. One of the remote sensing technologies that has gained importance in the last decade is light detection and ranging (lidar), which describes the surveyed area with 3D points, presented as point clouds....
Previous research has found some bicyclists disregard circular red indications and stop signs. Possible justifications include a desire to increase safety, save energy, save time, and increase visibility. Because of this, many bicyclists feel as though stopping at stop signs, especially in the absence of conflicting vehicular traffic, is an...
Civil engineers are aware of the impacts of structures on the global environment but the environmental impacts of a fire within these structures remains unknown. Fires present a unique hazard as it is difficult to predict the probability of the occurrence and the intensity. Traditional methods to identify the environmental...
Wave energy converters (WECs) show promising potential to significantly contribute to global renewable energy goals. Numerous WEC designs have been proposed and investigated, but wave energy conversion technology has yet to reach convergence in the same way wind or solar has. Of the designs currently in existence, surface-piercing WECs are...
Wind energy has become a crucial resource in sustainably meeting increasing global energy demands. Recently, offshore wind energy has been gaining traction due to its higher gross resource and larger unclaimed real-estate relative to its onshore counterpart. Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) are increasingly popular, particularly designs with semisubmersible platforms....
Geotechnical engineers design and analyze the interface between the natural and built environments, often based on uncertain and inherently variable data due to the nature of the building material, soil. Engineers must estimate the subsurface conditions at a site using historical, in-situ, and laboratory testing data. However, only discrete representative...
Reinforced concrete (RC) column-footing substructures are widely used to support bridges along critical transportation corridors in Oregon. Those built prior to 1971 were typically designed to resist only gravity loads. Therefore, they are vulnerable to damage or collapse during strong ground shaking. To prevent collapse, seismic retrofits have been developed...
While real-time hybrid simulation has been utilized for structures subjected to seismic events for decades, its use in fluid-structure interaction problems is still a novel endeavor. Gathering data for cascading seismic and tsunami events is difficult due to space constraints in existing experimental facilities, complications regarding the application of scaling...
Wave runup is an important physical process that affects nearshore sediment transport, coastal erosion, and flooding. Large and unexpected runup events can also be dangerous to beach goers. Extreme runup statistics are essential parameters used in engineering design of marine structures and in coastal management. Although the study of runup...
Preparing successful engineering undergraduate students for the workforce is imperative and requires students to apply their conceptual understanding of engineering fundamentals to engineering design work. Conceptual understanding is assessed through the use of concept inventories. Learning theories may help explain differences in concept inventory performance. Expert novice theory suggests that...
The behavior of mass timber beam-to-column connections under seismic loading is not yet well understood. Mass timber beam-to-column connections must have the ability to maintain load-carrying capacity despite the deformations that will be imposed on all components of the building during seismic events. This behavior is called deformation compatibility. The...
Pile caps are structural elements used to transfer loads from columns to a group of piles, which transfer them to stronger soil layers. Pile cap with horizontal distance between the column and piles less than twice its effective depth is categorized as "deep," where significant nonlinear strain distribution occurs through...
With rising sea levels and more frequent exposure to extreme storms, coastlines worldwide are vulnerable to increased erosion and loss of natural marsh lands. In an effort to lessen these impacts, there is a growing practice of adapting hard or “gray” coastline protection techniques to more nature-based features that promote...
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to significant transformations in global mobility patterns, primarily driven by stay-at-home orders and economic shutdowns. These measures resulted in a substantial decline in travel activities worldwide. In the United States, there was a notable reduction in travel demand, with a corresponding decrease in...
The most common test methods to evaluate alkali-silica reaction (ASR), the concrete prism test (CPT) and the accelerated mortar bar tests (AMBT), have limitations and are not entirely reliable in terms of predicting the performance of concrete with prevention measures under field conditions. In this study, the miniature concrete prism...
Physical modelling is instrumental to the progression of coastal engineering research and our understanding of the offshore and nearshore environments. Scaled models are designed and built to be tested in coastal research laboratories, where a wave basin or flume generates the desired wave conditions for experimentation. The surrounding hydrodynamics of...
It is considered best practice when designing pedestrian access at intersections to provide two curb ramps at each street corner. In Oregon, there are many locations where long ramp runs cause curb ramps to be set back a significant distance from the apex of the intersection corner to meet this...
Urban stormwater runoff with a high impervious area can significantly impact pollution concentrations of receiving water bodies. The use of low impact development (LID), which mimics the hydrological properties of the site before development, has been studied in an increasing number of studies, and the available database has shown to...
Intersections pose unique transportation challenges regarding safety and operational efficiency. When pedestrians currently want to cross at intersection, they need to use a push button to issue a call for service. The call is static and cannot be altered or changed. But by implementing dynamic passive pedestrian detection sensors, intersections...
Accommodating motor vehicles that are turning (left or right) at signalized intersections requires a careful understanding of the safety and efficiency of design and operational variables. Turning vehicles are the primary collision risk for non-motorized road users at signalized intersections. When turning movements need to be controlled, proper driver response...
Travel demand has increased due to population growth, increase of vehicle ownership, and development patterns resulting in greater levels of congestion, pollution, and crash frequency. One approach to demand management is to increase the share of trips made by bicycles. With the increase in bicycling rates, there is a critical...
Signalized intersections often provide pushbuttons to call for pedestrian service to minimize conflicting movements between road users. Signalized midblock crossings typically increase safety for pedestrians in locations with high traffic volumes and multiple lanes in each direction. However, unnecessary vehicular delay occurs from “ghost” pedestrian intervals when someone activates the...
Earthquake-induced liquefaction is a large contributor to damage observed following seismic events. Commonly observed damage consists of significant ground and structural failure due to the deformation of large volumes of soil due to soil liquefaction and lateral spreading. A significant focus of geotechnical seismic research concentrates on the development and...
Over the decades, worker performance on construction projects has been a significant source of concern to be evaluated. Comprehensive studies have developed models for evaluating worker performance outside of the construction industry; however, minimal research has been conducted to evaluate worker performance in the construction industry. One of the reasons...
Mass timber has been considered as a promising building material because of its structural rigidity, environmental sustainability, and renewability nature. In Europe and Australia, mass timber materials have been used for many different types of construction such as residential, commercial, education, and industrial. However, the construction practitioners in the U.S....
Aligning Real-Time Networks (RTNs) with the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS) is crucial to ensure accuracy, consistency, interoperability, and long-term data integrity for geospatial applications. However, the effectiveness of different alignment methods as well as the need for monitoring approaches to maintain alignment consistency with the NSRS have not yet...
This work investigates a methodology for estimating the ocean stratification gradient based on high-resolution, in space and time, remote sensing observations of internal wave propagation speeds. The internal wave speed observations were collected using a shore-based, X-band marine radar and the ocean vertical density profiles were collected simultaneously from an...
Ice–ocean interactions have profound consequences for the ocean and climate, influencing the rate of sea level rise. Submarine melt is commonly parameterized using a three-equation formulation for the heat, salt, and momentum conservation equations coupled to a buoyant plume model, together called plume-melt theory. However, recent direct observations of terminus...
Thermodynamic modeling of cementitious material is an established tool for predicting the hydrated phase assemblages, pore solution pH, and pore solution composition of mixtures of various chemical compositions and water-to-binder (w/b) ratios. However, traditional thermodynamic techniques have major limitations for modeling mixtures containing supplementary cementitious materials (SCM), and when modeling...
Marine debris is a chronic and increasingly pervasive problem for coastal regions around the world. Debris poses environmental risks, threats to wildlife, and degradation of the natural environment. Recent research has shown the advantages of uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) for detection and recognition of marine debris, including the ability to...
Submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) species, such as seagrasses, are highly valued in estuaries because of the many economic, ecological, and cultural services that they provide, including shelter for fisheries, minimizing water turbidity, and improving am-bient water quality. SAV can also alter its physical environment by attenuating wave and current velocities,...
Diatomaceous soils are a geological material whose engineering properties do not readily conform to the widely accepted and used mechanical and behavioral frameworks. This ambiguity results in design difficulties and geotechnical failures which can be costly. Diatomaceous soils have diatoms in their matrix. Diatoms are unicellular algae with an inert...
Frequent 3D spatial mapping of estuaries is critical to understanding and modeling changes that can impact ecological health (e.g., water quality) and ecosystem services (e.g., aquaculture, nutrient cycling, and shoreline stabilization). However, obtaining accurate, repeat topobathymetric data for estuaries is a major challenge. Because shallow estuaries are typically not used...