Due to age, original design that is deficient by modern standards, inadequate maintenance, environmental conditions, and increasing loads, large numbers of bridges in United States and elsewhere are classified as deficient and in need of rehabilitation or replacement. According to a national bridge inventory established by the Federal Highway Administration,...
Non-destructive testing methods and applications have become of increasing interest due to the worldwide aging and deteriorating infrastructure network. In the field of Civil Engineering, bridges and bridge components as well as non-structural elements such as roadway pavements for example, are affected. In particular, the Acoustic Emission (AE) technique offers...
The evaluation of pavement condition is an important part of pavement
management. To evaluate a pavement, a distress survey has been performed mainly by
manual field inspections. Several automatic pavement evaluation systems have been
developed to overcome the drawbacks of field inspections. Automated evaluation
systems, however, imply their own limitations...
This work furthers the understanding of processes occurring in catchments that affect stream nitrate concentrations using two different approaches: a temporally intensive case study of three headwater catchments with varying land use (through storm event monitoring) and a spatially intensive study on the regional scale (through statistical modeling) of 1st-4th...
The rural two-lane highway in the southeastern United States is frequently associated with a disproportionate number of serious and fatal crashes. The major research objectives are to investigate the relations between probabilities of fatal crash type occurrence and potential contributing factors from road geometric design characteristics and roadside, environmental features....
Probability-based reliability methods have placed an increased emphasis on realistic simulation of structural behavior in bridge engineering. Uncertainty is present in every aspect of structural analysis. Aleatory uncertainties in the loading and load-carrying capacities, and epistemic uncertainties in mathematical idealization of bridge systems are the major contributors to uncertain structural...
Different specimen preparation methods such as moist tamping, dry funnel deposition, slurry deposition, dry air pluviation have been reported in the literature to investigate the undrained behavior of silty sands. Similarly, different means have been used to densify the soils prepared with such methods. However, the influence of the densification...
This research focused on the enhanced reductive dechlorination of trichloroethene (TCE) and its surrogate, trichlorofluoroethene (TCFE), using two bioremediation methods in anaerobic conditions. Two anaerobic bioremediation studies were conducted to investigate the effects of microbial communities in the presence of different electron acceptors and donors during anaerobic reductive dechlorination of...
A commercially available, three-dimensional (3-D) finite-element (FE) analysis
program was used to model metal-plate-connected (MPC) joints in wooden trusses.
The model's features included consideration of material properties, teeth-to-grain-to-direction-
of-force orientation, and wood-to-wood contact. Non-linear spring elements,
placed on the wood surface between wood and plate, were used to represent wood-to-teeth...
Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) is an interesting and challenging interdisciplinary area comprised of fields such as engineering- fluids/structures/solids, computational science, and mathematics. FSI has several practical engineering applications such as the design of coastal infrastructure (such as bridges, levees) subjected to harsh environments from natural forces such as tsunamis, storm surges,...