Kristine Sanchez

Urban flooding is triggered when surface runoff exceeds the capacity of drainage systems, which happens when heavy rainfall pours on to drainage areas with limited capacity, or on medium rainfall that falls on poorly planned or maintained drainage systems. Due to accelerated population growth and change in land use patterns, human vulnerability to floods has increased, and it is likely to increase further unless changes are made on the urban drainage system. The use of surface runoff and drainage modeling would help to identifyareas that are susceptible to flooding and to determine the dynamic capabilities of urban drainage network. The use of GIS-based software and hydrologic modeling will provide fast and reviewable assessment of the existing drainage system of the catchment. GIS generated results – especially in the delineation of catchment and sub-catchments and in identifying drainage networks – were validated in the field. Field observations also showed the presence of polluta...

Meandering has been studied as one of the most interesting processes among river evolution phenomena. Many theoretical studies have been done on the development of meandering. If a small sinusoidal disturbance is imposed to the planar shape of river channels, the curvature of the river channel causes a deviation of the flow towards the outer bank, and accumulation on the inner bank occur, and meandering makes further development under some conditions. Ikeda, Parker, Sawai provided a first theoretical explanation on the mechanism of meandering as a shear instability on both banks in terms of linear stability analysis. Afterwards, the influence of interaction and resonance with fluvial bars has been taken into account from the condition satisfying the continuity of sediment and the influence of secondary flow due to meandering has been included into the linear stability analysis. According to these theories, the development of meandering and the formation of sand bars interact with ea...

A novel computer vision application is developed to measure the deflection of two-dimensional (2D) reinforced concrete structural members. Eight beam samples, with dimensions of 160 mm x 150 mm x 1400 mm are loaded and simulated under a four-point loading test until failure using a reaction framework machine. A camera is fixed at the center front view of the concrete beams to capture the deflection of the samples while testing. In each test, a dial indicator is installed and the maximum deflection is manually recorded. Based on the results, the maximum deflection values recorded by the proposed application obtained an average error of 18.38 % when compared to the manual measured results. This indicates that computer vision-based application can provide a beam-wide scale deflection performance, compared to the traditional point-based deflection reading. This study paves a new possibility of aiding manual measurements of concrete beams and all other structural studies.