Dwindling revenue sources force transportation engineers to implement less durable solutions to d... more Dwindling revenue sources force transportation engineers to implement less durable solutions to distribute limited resources to the most critical and competing maintenance and development projects. However, implementing less durable solutions often increases the infrastructure life cycle costs. Several recent studies have found that a significant portion of truck traffic operates with weights above legal weight limits, which are not considered in current pavement design practices. These overweight trucks cause accelerated pavement deterioration. In this study, authors investigated the deterioration of pavements to quantify relative pavement damage attributed to overweight trucks compared to trucks within legal weight limits. In South Carolina, weigh-in-motion data revealed that 8.3% trucks were either axle overweight or gross vehicle overweight. To accommodate these 8.3% overweight trucks, which are not considered in the current equivalent single axle load (ESAL) based design method...
In 2008, a list of engineering challenges put forth by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) ... more In 2008, a list of engineering challenges put forth by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) identified the need for technological innovations for global progress. These challenges focused on education, energy, infrastructure, clean water, climate change, and much more. In an effort to help foster a generation of engineers that are more aware of their role in making the world a better place, a partnership was formed with the Adventure Aquarium Center for Aquatic Sciences (CAS). Funded by the National Science Foundation, the goal of this partnership was to form a multidisciplinary engineering team focused on adapting current experiments to more environmentally conscious alternatives. These experiments have begun to be implemented in freshman engineering courses, the STEM Academy at Glassboro High School, and K-12 outreach programs. Ultimately, the purpose of these experiments is to reduce environmental impact by replacing current environmental processes with algae based alternati...
2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2018
The objective of the paper is to present a work-in-progress effort in integrating an inclusivity ... more The objective of the paper is to present a work-in-progress effort in integrating an inclusivity component in a civil engineering materials course. Civil Engineering Materials is a required junior level 2- credit course with a lab on aggregates, cement, cement concrete and asphalt, and hot mix asphalt. There were 72 students in the class with 24 groups of three members each. In fall 2017, the instructor introduced an activity in half of the number of groups compared the testing standard of construction materials between two states within the US and the other half compared the testing standards between a state in the US and a different country. The objective of this activity was to expose half of the cohort of students to practices in different countries and evaluate the impact of exposing this activity on the social attitudes. The course has a two 75-minute lecture slot, and one 150 min slot for laboratory. The instructor was supported by four lab assistants. However, the students m...
Phase of flight (POF) prediction estimates the future state of aircraft along planned trajectorie... more Phase of flight (POF) prediction estimates the future state of aircraft along planned trajectories, allowing the prediction of potential conflicts as well as optimization of air space, controlled by the Federal Aviation Administration. In this paper, we present a study conducted to develop three different POF forecasting machine learning models and a statistical regression model using four-dimensional GPS and RADAR Track data from 57 flights provided by an En Route Computer System. The investigated machine learning models include Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODE). These were developed to forecast the horizontal and vertical POF of the current aircraft for the next time step. The results in this study indicate that LSTM-RNN models are more suitable for POF prediction than SVM and statistical regression models, with NODE being a promising model for future trajectory prediction res...
The research project described in this paper is titled “Rethinking Engineering Diversity, Transfo... more The research project described in this paper is titled “Rethinking Engineering Diversity, Transforming Engineering Diversity (REDTED),” which is part of the National Science Foundation, Revolutionizing Engineering Department (RED) grants. The project is in its first year and therefore what is described in this paper will be a brief overview of the project and some of the work done during the first year. The proposed research is to explore how the representation of women and Underrepresented Minority (URM) students and historically underserved groups will be increased in an engineering department by deploying a multi-pronged approach. Our definition of diverse student populations includes both visible differences such as gender and racial minorities, but also includes invisible differences such as poor, LGBTQ, disabled, veterans, and others. The approach includes curricular and extra-curricular reform, which is targeted at the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department at R...
Dwindling revenue sources force transportation engineers to implement less durable solutions to d... more Dwindling revenue sources force transportation engineers to implement less durable solutions to distribute limited resources to the most critical and competing maintenance and development projects. However, implementing less durable solutions often increases the infrastructure life cycle costs. Several recent studies have found that a significant portion of truck traffic operates with weights above legal weight limits, which are not considered in current pavement design practices. These overweight trucks cause accelerated pavement deterioration. In this study, authors investigated the deterioration of pavements to quantify relative pavement damage attributed to overweight trucks compared to trucks within legal weight limits. In South Carolina, weigh-in-motion data revealed that 8.3% trucks were either axle overweight or gross vehicle overweight. To accommodate these 8.3% overweight trucks, which are not considered in the current equivalent single axle load (ESAL) based design method...
In 2008, a list of engineering challenges put forth by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) ... more In 2008, a list of engineering challenges put forth by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) identified the need for technological innovations for global progress. These challenges focused on education, energy, infrastructure, clean water, climate change, and much more. In an effort to help foster a generation of engineers that are more aware of their role in making the world a better place, a partnership was formed with the Adventure Aquarium Center for Aquatic Sciences (CAS). Funded by the National Science Foundation, the goal of this partnership was to form a multidisciplinary engineering team focused on adapting current experiments to more environmentally conscious alternatives. These experiments have begun to be implemented in freshman engineering courses, the STEM Academy at Glassboro High School, and K-12 outreach programs. Ultimately, the purpose of these experiments is to reduce environmental impact by replacing current environmental processes with algae based alternati...
2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2018
The objective of the paper is to present a work-in-progress effort in integrating an inclusivity ... more The objective of the paper is to present a work-in-progress effort in integrating an inclusivity component in a civil engineering materials course. Civil Engineering Materials is a required junior level 2- credit course with a lab on aggregates, cement, cement concrete and asphalt, and hot mix asphalt. There were 72 students in the class with 24 groups of three members each. In fall 2017, the instructor introduced an activity in half of the number of groups compared the testing standard of construction materials between two states within the US and the other half compared the testing standards between a state in the US and a different country. The objective of this activity was to expose half of the cohort of students to practices in different countries and evaluate the impact of exposing this activity on the social attitudes. The course has a two 75-minute lecture slot, and one 150 min slot for laboratory. The instructor was supported by four lab assistants. However, the students m...
Phase of flight (POF) prediction estimates the future state of aircraft along planned trajectorie... more Phase of flight (POF) prediction estimates the future state of aircraft along planned trajectories, allowing the prediction of potential conflicts as well as optimization of air space, controlled by the Federal Aviation Administration. In this paper, we present a study conducted to develop three different POF forecasting machine learning models and a statistical regression model using four-dimensional GPS and RADAR Track data from 57 flights provided by an En Route Computer System. The investigated machine learning models include Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODE). These were developed to forecast the horizontal and vertical POF of the current aircraft for the next time step. The results in this study indicate that LSTM-RNN models are more suitable for POF prediction than SVM and statistical regression models, with NODE being a promising model for future trajectory prediction res...
The research project described in this paper is titled “Rethinking Engineering Diversity, Transfo... more The research project described in this paper is titled “Rethinking Engineering Diversity, Transforming Engineering Diversity (REDTED),” which is part of the National Science Foundation, Revolutionizing Engineering Department (RED) grants. The project is in its first year and therefore what is described in this paper will be a brief overview of the project and some of the work done during the first year. The proposed research is to explore how the representation of women and Underrepresented Minority (URM) students and historically underserved groups will be increased in an engineering department by deploying a multi-pronged approach. Our definition of diverse student populations includes both visible differences such as gender and racial minorities, but also includes invisible differences such as poor, LGBTQ, disabled, veterans, and others. The approach includes curricular and extra-curricular reform, which is targeted at the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department at R...
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