Leo Liu (CEE) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $149,000 research and development contract with the Michigan Department of Transportation. Stan Vitton (CEE), Min Wang (Math) and Michael Billmire (MTRI) are Co-PIs on the project “Develop and Implement a Freeze Thaw Model Based on Seasonal Load Restriction Decision Support Tool.”
This is a two-year project.
By Sponsored Programs.
The Rail Transportation Program Director, Pasi Lautala, undergraduate research assistant Aaron Dean (MEEM) and graduate research assistant Soumith Oduru (CEE) presented four papers at the conference. Oduru also received the ASME Rail Transportation Division (RTD) Graduate Student Conference Scholarship of $1100 and Dean received the ASME Rail Transportation Division (RTD) Undergraduate Student Conference Scholarship of $800.
The paper titles were “Incorporating Life Cycle Assessment in Freight Transportation Infrastructure Project Evaluation” (Oduru, Lautala), “Effectiveness of Using SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study Data to Analyze Driver Behavior at Highway-rail Grade Crossings” (Dean, Lautala, David Nelson (CEE)), “Selection of Representative Crossings Database for the Evaluation of Driver Behavior Over Highway-rail Grade Crossings” (Modeste Muhire, Lautala, Nelson, Dean) and “Sensor Fusion of Wayside Visible and Thermal Imagery for Rail Car Wheel and Bearing Damage Detection” (Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Timothy Havens (CEE), Lautala).
Center for Technology and Training (CTT) Software Engineers Byrel Mitchell, Andrew Rollenhagen and Mike Pionke traveled in lower Michigan providing Roadsoft on-site technical assistance at the cities of St. Louis, Vernon, Laingsburg and Kalamazoo, and the Calhoun and Kent County Road Commissions during the week of April 17.
This is the fourth year CTT has conducted the semi-annual Roadsoft Tech Assist visits, which are hands-on sessions with agency-specific topics. Besides helping Roadsoft customers, the sessions provide CTT software engineers with valuable information about client workflow and challenges. Roadsoft is a roadway asset management software suite for collecting, storing and analyzing data associated with transportation infrastructure.
Roadsoft is developed and supported by the Center for Technology and Training with principle funding from the Michigan Department of Transportation.
World Water Day was celebrated at Michigan Tech on March 20 – 23, 2017 with a focus on Wastewater. As part of the festivities, students took part in a poster competition. Here is a listing of the winners:
1st Place ($250): Christa Meingast
“High-Tech Analysis of Low-Cost, low-Tech Methods for Sustainable Class A Biosolids Production: Set up and Initial Pilot-Scale Data”
3rd Place ($100): Kyle Hillstead, Julianna Mickle, and Caryn Murray
“Using the Four R’s in the design of De Facto Potable Reuse Water for Enhanced Public Health”
Benjamin Winter, a PhD candidate in Civil Engineering, has recently been selected to participate in this year’s Advanced Studies Institute (ASI) at the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL). The ASI is a 3-week program where multi-disciplinary teams of three doctoral and/or postdoctoral students work on challenging problems related to national security. Under the guidance of LANL mentors, teams develop research proposals to sell their solutions to these problems. The program culminates with team presentations on their solution concepts to a committee of LANL staff and program managers for critical review. During the program, students attend a daily technical and professional development lecture series and work on their team research topics.
YubaNet.com quoted Veronica Webster (CEE) on the hydraulic structural problems underlying the erosion of the Oroville Dam spillway in California.
February 15, 2017 – Civil engineer Veronica Webster studies long-term trends for assessing flood risk at Michigan Technological University. She says that for the Oroville Dam, the immediacy of the problem is related to longer running issues.
Many of our hydraulic structures are likely under designed. —Veronica Webster
Webster is an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Michigan Tech and is a recent recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award to study flood frequency and risk analysis.
Read more at YubaNet.com, by Michigan Technological University.
Daniel M. Dowden, Patricia Clayton, Chao-Hsien Li, Jeffrey Berman, Michael Bruneau, Laura Lowes and Keh-Chyuan Tsai have been selected by the Structural Engineering Institute to receive the 2017 Moisseiff Award “For the paper, “Full-Scale Pseudodynamic Testing of Self-Centering Steel Plate Shear Walls,” Journal of Structural Engineering, January 2016.”
The award ceremony will take place during the Structures Congress 2017 in Denver, CO, April 7, 2017.
The award recognizes important papers dealing with the broad field of structural design, including applied mechanics as well as the theoretical analysis, or constructive improvement, of engineering structures such as bridges and frames, of any structural material.
The Structural Engineering Institute is part of ASCE, the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The Michigan Tech Transportation Institute (MTTI) held its annual general membership meeting on Jan. 5. Thirty members attended the working luncheon.
An overview of 2016 with institute highlights was presented by MTTI Director Pasi Lautala. Researchers provided updates on initiatives funded with the meeting ending in an open, general discussion. Slides used in the meeting are available along with a general summary of the meeting here.
For more information on MTTI, see our website or contact Lautala at 7-3547 or Pam Hannon at 7-3065.
By Pam Hannon/MTTI.
The 96th Transportation Research Board (TRB) annual meeting was held in Washington, D.C. Jan. 8-12 focusing on the theme “Transportation Innovation: Leading the Way in an Era of Rapid Change.” Joining the 13,000 attendees were 24 members and students of the Michigan Tech Transportation Institute (MTTI).
Read more on the MTTI webpage.
Researchers at The Center for Technology and Training, which is part of the civil and environmental engineering department, have developed a new system for assessing the conditions of gravel roads. This system and its use by Michigan road agencies was the subject of an article in the winter 2016 Journal of the County Road Association of Michigan.
CTT staff, John Kiefer, Melanie Kueber-Watkins, Pete Torola and Tim Colling all worked to develop and test the new system which will be widely collected in Michigan starting this year with full implementation in 2018. Data collected with the system will be reported on a state-wide basis to the Michigan Legislature on an annual basis.
New Inventory-Based Rating System Pilot Tested in 2016Gravel and unpaved roads make up half of Michigan’s non-federal aid network, and there are 22,000 miles of them in Michigan.
As a result of a project funded by the Michigan Transportation Asset Management Council (TAMC), CTT has pioneered a new rating system for unpaved roads, called the inventory-based ratings (IBR) system.
Read more at The Quarterly Journal of the County Road Association of Michigan.