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...
There are many aging bridges in service in the US and around the world that were not constructed to modern seismic design codes and standards. As a result, they are expected to perform poorly during intense earthquake ground shaking. Older reinforced concrete (RC) bridges, in particular, are often supported on...
With ever-increasing number of vehicles actively using the state and national roadway network, transportation-related fuel consumption and consequent pavement structural damage rises. In this dissertation, the impact of material-induced dissipated energy mechanisms in asphalt and concrete pavements were analyzed using field measurements in California and finite element modeling of pavement...
Numerical results are presented using a higher-order pseudo-spectral method in order to solve the Zakharov-Craig-Sulem formulation of the Euler model. We study the effects of variable bathymetry on weakly-dispersive, weakly-nonlinear, shallow water waves. Improved predictions on wave amplitude and shoaling behavior are developed by analytical means in the context of...
Unmanned aerial systems (UASs), more commonly known as drones, have recently achieved commercial success for many public and private applications. As with all emerging technologies, new safety concerns and conflicts with existing paradigms are likely to arise. Many potential applications of UASs will result in their operation near roadway infrastructure,...
Bridges are a vital component of transportation infrastructure in the United States, and the continual maintenance and preservation of bridges is critical to maintaining their structural capacity and maximizing service life. One of the most significant issues faced by concrete bridges is the infiltration of moisture from the roadway surface...
Connections in mass timber structural systems dissipate energy and transfer lateral forces from mass timber elements such as shear walls and diaphragms, providing critical load paths. Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is a prominent mass timber material used to manufacture wall and floor assemblies. Fire performance research of CLT walls and floors...
Coastal hazards are the result of numerous physical processes cumulatively causing water levels to flood and erode the land. The waves, storm surges, tides, and run-off contributing to elevated water levels are each the product of chaotic and random weather patterns. These stochastic weather patterns dissipate energy in Earth's climate...
This study evaluates the productivity and accuracy of surveys completed with single-base real-time kinematic (RTK) Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) using four different GNSS constellation combinations: (1) GPS-only, (2) GPS+GLONASS, (3) GPS+Galileo+BeiDou, and (4) GPS+GLONASS+Galileo+BeiDou. For this comparison, we set up a test site consisting of 20 stations ranging with...
Timber engineering is currently in the midst of a significant evolution due to the rise of mass timber products, like cross-laminated timber (CLT). Increasing numbers of structural engineers are facing the challenge of designing lateral-force-resisting systems (LFRS) for multistory CLT structures. LFRS solutions such as steel frames, concrete cores, or...
The construction industry is a key contributor to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of many countries around the world and is valued at more than $10 trillion globally. Schedule, cost and quality are the main performance measures of construction projects. The primary goal for project stakeholders in the construction industry...
The northern Oregon coast suffers extensive loss of land as a result of landslides which constitute the primary mechanism of coastline recession. Both real property and structures along the coast have been destroyed and this destruction will continue. In certain instances, it may be feasible to protect property by engineered...
Strong ground motions from earthquakes can result in the reduction of the shear modulus and wave propagation characteristics of soils, and can produce liquefaction and cyclic softening during shaking and for some time following the seismic event. While the ground motions produced from controlled blasting are different than those in...
A series of laboratory experiments were conducted to study the wave field in the inner lagoon excited by ‘long’ incident waves. Three cases were considered: Cases A, B and C presenting incident waves of wavelength with factors of 1, 2 and 2.5 times the width of the reef respectively. The...
A challenge for municipal authorities of growing urban areas is to provide larger and faster transportation and utility networks that are safe and resilient to significant disruptions after an earthquake event and other disasters. Urban regions, like the San Francisco Bay or the Los Angeles area, are situated in seismically...
Asphalt concrete fatigue cracking is recognized as a major distress mode in the U.S. The widespread nature of this distress and the data from agency Pavement Management Systems (PMS) suggest that it is an issue with asphalt mixture design and production processes and is not a problem specific to certain...
The concept of construction industrialization, first raised in the 1960s, refers to the transfer of on-site construction work to an off-site factory to improve quality and reduce cost, time, and safety issues. In some countries, industrialization of construction projects is highly recommended and promoted by governments and local construction institutions...
For mid-rise and high rise buildings, slender reinforced concrete (RC) structural walls are commonly used as the main structural elements to resist lateral applied loads in high seismically areas around the globe. These RC structural walls can provide substantial deformation capacity, stiffness, and lateral strength through the contribution of their...
Bioretention facilities are emerging as a popular way to deal with stormwater runoff in urban environments and address its concerns. Real-time sensors installed in bioretention facilities aid in understanding the performance and feasibility of such facilities over time. A bioretention facility in Corvallis, Oregon was monitored for a study period...
Catastrophic earthquake and tsunami events that resulted in significant loss of life and property over the past two decades have raised the global awareness regarding the need to understand the response of communities and their built environment to multi-hazard extreme events. In recognition to this impending threat to the coastal...
Planning and management methods in construction need to constantly evolve to keep pace with the growing demand and complexity of work in increasingly competitive environments. This need for innovation and process improvement has attracted lean construction philosophy in industry management practice. Lean has been used in the construction industry to...
The two primary considerations for highway work-zones are its effect on commuter mobility and worker safety which are often spoken of together. However, it must be noted that they often conflict with each other. For example, traffic control plans that reduce travel speed in work-zones improve both commuter and worker...
Engineering practitioners solve problems in various ways; it is plausible that they often rely on graphs, figures, formulas and other representations to reach a solution. How and why engineering practitioners use representations to solve problems can characterize certain problem-solving behaviors, which can be used to determine particular types of problem...
Modern geospatial data are frequently represented in some type of three-dimensional (3D) coordinate system, for example geodetic latitude, longitude, and ellipsoid height (φ, λ, h) derived from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). But for engineering and surveying work, φ, λ, h coordinates are usually converted to a topocentric system consisting...
In the last few decades, a lot of studies have been conducted to study about the quality of stormwater runoff from various sites and conditions. Highways, residential areas, and commercial sites are the focus of most of these studies while limited studies have done examination of stormwater from Maintenance and...
High early strength (HES) concrete is becoming increasingly used to repair damaged concrete pavement sections. The use of HES concrete enables the repaired pavement to be opened to traffic within hours of placing the concrete. A common approach used for the rapid repair of concrete pavement consists of closing a...
Sustainable wastewater infrastructure systems are vital for civilizations to protect public health. Most of the structural elements of wastewater infrastructure are constructed using concrete owing to its versatility, low cost, and durability. Concrete structures that are exposed to wastewater can experience Microbially Induced Corrosion of Concrete (MICC), which is a...
The constituent materials of concrete often contain chlorides. The presence of chlorides in sufficient amounts can disrupt the passive layer, also known as the passive film, that protects the reinforcing steel in concrete. This disruption can lead to premature corrosion of the reinforcing steel in concrete. To minimize the risk...
Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), also known as drones, are an increasingly popular method of collecting surveying and mapping data. Two common drone-based mapping techniques are lidar and structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry, and a frequently-heard (yet nearly impossible to answer) question is: “which is better?” The most common metric for...
Building Information Modeling (BIM) offers a variety of tools to help a wide range of stakeholders in the construction industry. There has been substantial research on the advantages and challenges of implementing BIM for large and medium-sized construction companies; however, there is a dearth of research on the benefits and...
Tack coat emulsion, comprised of asphalt binder, water and emulsifying agents, is an interlayer membrane applied before asphalt pavement construction, which helps pavement layers bond together and permeate stresses and strains induced by heavy wheel loads through the entire thickness of the pavement structure. Proper interlayer bonding aids in preventing...