Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Washington State University National Center for Transportation Infrastructure Durability & Life-Extension (TriDurLE)

Webinar on Bridge Engineering: Insights into a Career as a Bridge Engineer

In celebration of Women’s History Month! Join Dr. Carmen Swanwick, a bridge engineer at the Utah Department of Transportation, as she discusses her insights into a career as a bridge engineer.
Dr.%20Carmen%20Swanwick

Carmen Swanwick, P.E., S.E
Deputy Project Development Director/Director of Construction
Utah Department of Transportation
Salt Lake City, Utah 84114
Email: cswanwick@utah.gov

Carmen Swanwick is the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) Deputy Project Development Director and Director of Construction.  Carmen served as the Department’s Chief Structural Engineer for almost ten years and has over 15 years of experience as a consultant in structural engineering within the transportation industry.  She received both her Bachelors and Masters degrees from the University of Utah in Civil/Structural Engineering.   Carmen is the AASHTO Committee on Bridges and Structures Chair and for the last six years served as the AASHTO Committee on Bridges and Structures (COBS) T-4 Committee on Construction Chair.  Carmen participates in numerous National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) projects and Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committees.  Carmen has been involved in several Department initiatives through the years including the Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) program, development of the Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) program and recently the Digital Delivery effort with an emphasis on Building Information Modeling (BIM) for bridges and structures.

“Development and Testing of Autonomous Vehicle Technology for Transportation Infrastructure Maintenance” By Dr. XB Hu

View a Recording of This Webinar

Development and Testing of Autonomous Vehicle Technology for Transportation Infrastructure Maintenance

Mobile and slow-moving operations, such as striping, sweeping, bridge flushing, and pothole patching, are critical for efficient and safe operation of a highway transportation system. However, reducing hazards for roadway workers and achieving a safer environment for both roadway maintenance operators and the public have been a challenging problem. In 2017 alone, a total of 158,000 total crashes occurred in our nation’s work zones, accounting for 61,000 injuries. The Autonomous Truck Mounted Attenuator (ATMA) vehicle, sometimes referred to as an Autonomous Impact Protection Vehicle (AIPV), offers a promising solution to eliminate injuries to Department of Transportation (DOT) employees.

In this webinar, we will present how to use Autonomous Vehicle technology for work zone maintenance, for the purpose of protecting DOT maintenance workers from potential crashes. We will also present the evaluation methodology for the ATMA system, as well as the field-testing outcomes in Sedalia, MO. We hope this webinar will be helpful for transportation agencies that are interested in deploying similar technologies, or for academic researchers to assess characteristics of autonomous vehicles and to apply knowledge gained in transportation modeling and simulation practices.

About the Presenter

Dr. XB Hu is currently an Assistant Professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Arizona in 2013 and was a founding team member and the Director of R&D at Metropia Inc. at Tucson AZ. His research focuses on smart transportation systems, transportation big data analytics, and traffic flow and system modeling. He is supporting Missouri DOT, Colorado DOT, and a pool-fund with 12 state DOT members to test and deploy autonomous maintenance technology in the United States.

Tazarv & Hart Awarded Research Fellowship

Dr. Mostafa Tazarv and student Kallan Hart (of South Dakota State University have been awarded the Dennis R. Mertz Bridge Research Fellowship for 2020-21 by PCI for their research fellowship proposal “Repairable Precast Bridge Bents for Extreme Events.” Congratulations! The researchers will be working on this project in collaboration with Gage Brothers Concrete Products and TriDurLE.

Mostafa%20Tazarv

Mostafa Tazarv

Kallan%20Hart

Kallan Hart

Developing Enhanced Performance Curves of ITD Asphalt Pavements by Mining the Historical Data


Project

Developing Enhanced Performance Curves of ITD Asphalt Pavements by Mining the Historical Data

Team

Xianming Shi, PI

Yong Deng, Co-PI

Description

The overarching goal of this project is to develop reliable and realistic and enhanced performance curves for ITD asphalt pavements by mining the historical data. To this end, the project has the following objectives: 1) identify the appropriate parameters and additional criteria to use in the enhanced asphalt performance curves; 2) develop and calibrate distress-specific models for forecasting future pavement conditions, for both new and rehabilitated asphalt pavements; 3) validate existing and enhanced curves using historical performance data.  This project fits into the National University Transportation Center (UTC) National Center for Transportation Infrastructure Durability & Life-Extension (TriDurLE) research thrust of “Asset management and performance management for enhanced durability and life-extension of transportation infrastructure”.

 

More Detail

Visuals

Dr. Xianming Shi

Dr. Yong Deng

Development of Multi-scale Self-healing High-volume Fly Ash UHPC


Project

Development of Multi-scale Self-healing High-volume Fly Ash UHPC

Team

Dr. Xianming Shi, Washington State University

Description

Despite its higher initial cost than conventional concrete, ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) is gaining popularity in applications such as prefabricated connections, bridge decks, beams, girders, pile foundations, thin-wall shell structures, encasement of corroded steel girders, and encasement of substandard or corroded columns. The durability of UHPC is challenged once cracks are generated in the UHPC structural members. The high materials cost of UHPC also limits its wide application in pavement and other civil infrastructures. In this context, the overarching goal of this project is to design a cost-effective UHPC featuring the use of high volume fly ash (HVFA) binder and ability to heal the cracks when and where needed. The multiscale self-healing ability of the HVFA UHPC will be achieved through the combined use of microcapsules and light-weight aggregate (LWA), so as to maintain the superior durability of the UHPC. To this end, this exploratory laboratory investigation aims to:

1) design healing agents and multi-dimensional microcapsules and LWAs to heal cracks with different widths

2) identify cost-effective mix designs for UHPC with the use of HVFA binder

3) evaluate the self-healing effectiveness of dog-bone shape HVFA UHPC specimens, using the direct tensile test and digital image correlation technique.

The specific design of this novel UHPC is as follows. Different sizes of polymeric microcapsules (with inorganic healant) are obtained through a water-in-oil suspension polymerization technique and LWAs are encapsulated with a modified polymer coating. The healing agents incorporating a novel nano-material, graphene oxide (GO), are synthesized to improve the healing efficiency of cracked UHPC. More crystals are expected to form inside the cracks and provide comparable strength as the intact part, so that the tensile properties of cracked UHPC can be greatly recovered after self-healing.

More Detail

Visuals

Dr. Xianming Shi

Bayesian Network


Project

Multi-Level Resilience-Based Transportation Asset Management (TAM) Framework using Bayesian Network

Team

Ji Yun Lee, PI, Washington State University
Yue Li, PI, Case Western Reserve University
Xiong Yu, Co-PI, Case Western Reserve University

Description

This project proposes a multi-level resilience-based transportation asset management framework using Bayesian network. The framework is aimed at (a) measuring transportation network resilience at multiple management levels (e.g., project, network and enterprise levels), (b) tracking and quantifying uncertainties existing at every level so as to effectively manage uncertainties in assessing the overall network resilience, (c) determining the optimal combination of inspection/monitoring techniques based on Value of Information, and (d) providing the optimal allocation of budgets to multiple pre- and post-disaster resilience-enhancing strategies.

The project will provide decision-makers (e.g., state DOT risk managers, executives, and program and project managers) with several analytical models, including (a) component-level time-dependent reliability analysis and its updating procedure based on different types of inspection and monitoring techniques; (b) network analysis which can incorporate both the robustness of components and the adaptive capacity of a network; (c) Bayesian-network-based resilience assessment model that evaluates each resilience capacity at multiple transportation management system levels and quantifies uncertainty at every assessment stage; and (d) asset management strategies by disaggregating resilience into the three resilience capacities using backward simulation. The framework itself and such analytical models can be implemented in risk-/resilience-based transportation asset management. Moreover, this project can be extended to develop a Python interactive tool, which is designed to enable transportation agencies to understand how the research findings can be easily and successfully implemented in improving the resilience of their transportation system.

Impacts/Benefits

More Details

Visuals

Ji%20Yun%20Li%2C%20PI

Dr. Ji Yun Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Washington State University (WSU). Prior to joining WSU in 2017, Dr. Lee served as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (2016-2017) and a Visiting Faculty in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering at the of Central Florida (2015-2016). She received her Ph.D. (2015) in Civil Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, her M.S. (2011) in Civil Engineering from Stanford University, and her B.S. (2009) in Architectural Engineering from Korea University. Her research experience and interests lie in the general field of structural reliability and risk assessment of civil infrastructure systems and supply chain network exposed to extreme events, risk-informed decision-making, and infrastructure/community resilience.