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Archives: Monthly Archives: June 2016

Preparing to Face a Hurricane

By Josh Garvey

The next time Connecticut is facing a hurricane, the response may be better organized and more efficient, thanks to the combined efforts of UConn researchers and the Connecticut Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security (DEMHS).

Brett Decker ’14 (ENG), a master’s student in civil and environmental engineering, and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering Nicholas Lownes have developed a model that evaluates which of the state’s 220 storm shelters should open in the event of a hurricane, according to the intensity of the storm.

“What Brett’s model and work is helping to do is be more strategic in the maintenance and planning and the provision of supplies and stuff at these locations,” Lownes says. “At the end of the day, it’s trying to give DEMHS a leg up in being prepared for hurricanes and dealing with a limited budget.”

DEMHS is responsible for an integrated and coordinated emergency management and homeland security program throughout the state.

Decker’s model, called a facility location model, is designed to minimize three factors: the travel time from home to shelter, the people not assigned to a shelter, and the cost of opening and operating an emergency shelter. To create the model, Decker looked at flood data along coastal regions, population data, the location of shelters, and other information.

Different weather scenarios can be put into the model, which can help people explore the results of different storm categories hitting the state. This can lead to some surprising results.

“We found that no matter how hard we ramped up the number of people evacuating, we never opened all the shelters.” Lownes said. “The maximum number of shelters we opened was somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 out of 220. That’s a 10 to 15 percent savings potential.”

He described the current approach as being aware of the existing shelter capabilities and making decisions on a case-by-case basis. By using a facility location model like the one Decker and Lownes have constructed, the approach could become more systematic and efficient.

The researchers say, however, that the model isn’t a quick-fix solution, as there are many unknowns. One area of uncertainty is how many people will require shelter from any given storm – many people choose to stay with friends or relatives or simply go to a hotel.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in what we’re doing,” Lownes says. “We’re not saying ‘this is the single best solution.’”

Lownes and Decker presented their model to DEMHS last fall.

William Hackett, director of state emergency management, was impressed: “Their research really put together public safety, the academic side, and the private sector in sheltering and large-weather response,” he says.

Decker’s work has led to an internship with DEMHS this semester, which is allowing him to refine the model. The facility location model is based on assumptions; by incorporating DEMHS’s extensive first-hand knowledge, those assumptions can be made more accurate and true-to-life.

“We could look at different hazards and how they might affect different areas,” says Mike Caplet, DEMHS Region 4 coordinator. “[Brett] has got a model, and we can tweak it with all of the details with local and regional partners – get that on-the-ground input.”

Hackett says research is an important part of emergency management going forward.

“We consider UConn a partner in our emergency management program,” he says. “Brett exemplifies the future of emergency management, using models to enhance our current policies and procedures. We welcome anyone who has interest in this sort of planning and modelling to work with us.”

Decker, who also earned his undergraduate degree at UConn, became interested in hurricane preparation and helping people who have been hurt by large storms after a trip during his sophomore year to New Orleans for rebuilding after the hurricane. He went again in his junior year, then led the trip in his senior year, with around 55 students building homes in the area. That passion led him to his graduate work, after a discussion with Lownes.

Lownes suggested that Decker work with him on a Department of Homeland Security fellowship, which facilitated the creation of their facility location model.

“Before Dr. Lownes talked to me about it, I didn’t think it was possible to combine my interest in engineering and transportation specifically with the volunteer work I’d done in New Orleans,” Decker says. “Being presented with this opportunity was very motivating for me, because I could maybe work toward planning so that what happened in New Orleans doesn’t happen in Connecticut.”

Steel Bridge Club Headed To National Competition

By Josh Garvey

The UConn Steel Bridge Club recently placed second in the American Society of Civil Engineers New England Regional Student Steel Bridge Competition. Because of that second place finish, they’ll be traveling to the national competition at Brigham Young University on May 27 and 28. That brings a new difficulty to the project- the team has to pay their way to the competition in a little under a month.

“I was very excited about the win, but the cost of the trip became an immediate concern. Before that, we didn’t know if we’d make the national competition.  Now, we have to get the team out to Utah,” Kevin McMullen said. McMullen, a doctoral student in structural engineering, is the graduate advisor to the club.

The competition involves creating a bridge

that can be broken down into 3 feet long sections. The team then assembles the bridge at the event, and is scored on the speed of assembly, the stiffness of the bridge, the weight of the bridge, the economy of the build and the overall efficiency of their project. The bridge is fabricated at a 1:10 scale, and must support 2,500 pounds.

This year, there were also a new set of rules, according to Rich Breitenbach (Civil and Environmental, ’17), the club president, which required the bridge to have a vertical and horizontal clearance within the center of the bridge to allow for a truck passageway.

“There were some dimensional issues in the design process this year. We had to design around the rules we were given- it was a pretty drastic change from previous competitions,” Breitenbach said.

For the national competition, the team will bring the same bridge, though they’re allowed to make repairs and improvements in the intervening month. McMullen said that he thought the team had good odds at the national competition.

“New England is a pretty dominant region in this competition, you’ll often have the New England teams in the race for the top 10 spots” he said.

Assistant Professor Arash Zaghi in civil and environmental engineering is the faculty advisor for the team, and Michael Culmo, the Vice President of Transportation & Structures at CME Associates, Inc., is an industry advisor.

To learn about supporting the team, visit their UConntact page and send a message.

UConn Led Travel Survey will give state decision makers updated information

By Josh Garvey

A new travel study being conducted by UConn faculty will provide data for the state travel model, updating decades-old information.

Gathering current data about residents’ travel characteristics will help the Connecticut Department of Transportation (CTDOT) to make transportation infrastructure decisions that account for all modes of travel based on up-to-date information.

The study will provide information that will be used to plan and prioritize future transportation decisions, such as whether to widen a highway or provide more public transportation to an area – decisions that are a part of the $100 million Let’s Go CT investment. The information will help determine the role transit, biking and walking can play in improving mobility in communities, and how we can improve roadways to more effectively handle increasing traffic and travel demands.

Professors Karthik Konduri and Nicholas Lownes in civil and environmental engineering are building and executing the survey, with the help of UConn students and Resource Systems Group (RSG Inc.), a consulting company with experience conducting large-scale transportation surveys in support of state of the art transportation models and research.

Part of the reason for this survey is a simple lack of modern information- there hasn’t been a large scale transportation survey conducted in the state for the past 40 years.

 “Connecticut has changed a lot in the last 40 years. The

state is investing in a lot of infrastructure improvements. With this data, they’ll be making decisions based on up-to-date information,” Konduri said.

Konduri and Lownes hope that this initial study will lead to a continued partnership between UConn and CTDOT for travel information. Konduri hopes to not only help update and maintain the existing models that CTDOT uses, but also create more in-depth models that will allow the agency to be more responsive to people’s travel needs.

“The models that are being estimated and calibrated will be used to support decisions on infrastructure investments,” Lownes said. “They’re useful for what if or scenario analysis. What will happen if we widen a freeway or add a bus line in a location, for instance.”

There are two parts to the study. An initial portion that gathers basic demographic information about everyone in the household, can be filled out right away. The more detailed section, part two, asks for a specific day’s travel – including a walk to a neighbor’s house, biking to the grocery store, taking the bus, or driving to work. Selected households will be assigned a travel date on one chosen weekday between March 15 and May 26.

“It’s every detail, every trip that you take throughout the day,” Konduri said. “We are collecting information about the purpose of each trip, travel characteristics and what they do at the destination.”

“If you go jogging or walk the dog, that’s part of the survey,” Lownes said.

Invitations are going to 150,000 households across the state, with a goal of 7,500 responses.

“The invites are going across the state, to all the major metro areas and to rural areas. We’re trying to make sure that every type of household in Connecticut is proportionally represented,” Konduri said.

Konduri and Lownes stressed that the privacy of people who participate will be well protected. They emphasized that no individual household data will ever be made visible. All answers will be kept strictly confidential and will only be analyzed with responses from all other participating households.

“We will ensure the highest levels of privacy. The identifiable information, such as names and addresses, will never be associated with the data they provide,” Konduri said.

Lownes emphasized how excited he and Konduri are to gather this information.

“The University of Connecticut serves as a hub for knowledge in Connecticut and seeks to educate and train the next generation.  This project serves both of these roles very well for the transportation community and is hopefully the beginning of a long and productive partnership.” said Lownes.

UConn professors Show Link Between More Parking Lots and Increased Driving

By Josh Garvey

While it seems like common sense to invest in parking to alleviate gridlock, two UConn professors and a UConn Ph.D. graduate have published work that suggests more parking availability leads to more traffic.

Professors Norman Garrick, civil and environmental engineering, and Carol Atkinson-Palombo, geography, along with UConn graduate Chris McCahill at the University of Wisconsin’s State Smart Transportation Initiative, have been working to examine how parking and highways have affected traffic throughout the years.

“The argument for building parking in the sixties was that traffic was going to increase therefore we need more parking and more highways,” Garrick said. “What we are finding with this research is that it was supplying parking and highways that actually facilitated the increase of traffic.”

Garrick said that in transportation research it is extremely difficult to prove cause and effect, in part because you cannot set a controlled experiment in which you tell some cities to increase parking and some to do the opposite. They had to find a different way to tease out what was cause and what was effect when it came to understanding the role of parking in the cities that they have been documenting for the last several years.

To do this they used a methodology developed in the 1960s which was used as a guideline to show a link between smoking and cancer. Th Bradford-Hill criteria for causation, from the field of epidemiology, is a list of conditions that suggest a cause and effect relationship between two observed events.

Using data going back to the 1960s, they were able to use the Bradford Hill criteria to strongly suggest that an increase in a city’s parking caused an increase in the city’s traffic. The study looked at 10 cities with varying rates of automobile use, including Hartford.

“What happened in cities like Hartford was that many trips, even relatively short ones that were once done by walking, biking or transit became automobile trips. Hartford saw a huge increase in car traffic with little or no economic gain. In comparison, cities like Cambridge and Berkeley experienced the opposite and now have more people walking to work than they did in the sixties,” Garrick said.

Their current research into parking ties into previous research conducted by Garrick and Atkinson-Palombo into how highways can contribute to congestion.

“A lot of what we have done in the transportation field is supposedly using models to predict the future. Garrick said. “We have actually made the future come true and gone beyond that predicted future. As we built more highways and more parking, we got even more driving than we predicted. It is a vicious cycle that is still ongoing for many cities. The end result is the continuing hollowing out of cities like Hartford,” Garrick said.

Garrick also linked their research to how parking lots limits tax revenue.

“One of the things we’re showing is that [Hartford] has foregone a huge amount of tax dollars- millions of dollars- by providing parking,” he said.

Atkinson-Palombo said that taxes can be used to encourage city development and limit what they call parking craters- portions of a city that are just parking lots, devoid of housing, businesses, and other positive features.

“Some cities have changed the way they tax buildings relative to land. If they’ve got really low taxation of vacant land, the hypothesis is that it incentives people to scrape the building off and just have surface parking. If you increase the taxation on land, you can completely change the profitability equation,” She said.

Garrick brought up how Cambridge, Mass. has set the taxation rate on parking garages at a much higher rate, which allows the city to promote development. Atkinson-Palombo cited Pittsburgh as a city that has used taxation as a means to dissuade parking lots. Garrick also mentioned Washington, D.C. as a city that has worked to counter excessive highways and parking lots by promoting development and public transportation options.

“Policies affecting cities play out over a time span of decades rather than months. However, few researchers nationwide are looking at the long term relationship between transportation and its effect on the environmental, social and economic sustainability of places.”

Garrick said that what he and Atkinson-Palombo are ultimately trying to do is to demonstrate transportation and urban development policies employed to solve perceived short-term problems can have lasting impacts on the lifeblood of communities and the people who live there.

“We need to adopt a transportation planning approach that is holistic in its scope and that look to the long-term well being of places,” Garrick said.

Glastonbury Eighth Graders Pour It On During Concrete Day At UConn

By Josh Garvey

A group of students gather around a machine designed to smash building materials, stored within a safety enclosure. More and more force presses down on a high-strength, three inch diameter concrete cylinder, well over two hundred thousand pounds. The students watch intently. Finally, the cylinder cracks with an intense bang and splinters of concrete bounce against the safety wall. The students jump and let out a startled scream.

The students are eighth-graders from Smith Middle School in Glastonbury who spent a day exploring concrete engineering at UConn’s Storrs campus on February 2, 2016. Professor Kay Wille in Civil and Environmental Engineering and his graduate and undergraduate students hosted the field trip with a number of activities designed to engage the student’s imaginations while teaching them about ultra-high performance concrete.

Beth Petritus, an eighth-grade science teacher at Smith Middle School, organized the day with Wille. Petritus said that the day came off brilliantly.

“After a field trip, unless you went to an amusement park, something exploded or they were riding on a coach bus, the kids say they didn’t have fun,” Petritus said. “With this trip they really enjoyed it. They were saying how cool it was, and that they would do it again.”

In addition to destroying cylinders, the students poured over 500 Lego blocks made of colored concrete, built spaghetti and marshmallow bridges, watched a documentary on the Burj Khalifa, and spent a lunch break with UConn faculty. Petritus said that the activities fit in well with new state guidelines.

“It fits in with the new Next Gen requirements that we just adopted here in Connecticut, As far as incorporating engineering into curriculum,” she said.

There was a guessing game for the amount of force needed to destroy the cylinders and a competition to see which student designed bridge could support the most weight.  All the students will receive the Lego blocks they made, and the competition winners received white ultra-high performance concrete that had been poured into Star Wars molds.

“The biggest pleasure for me was, during the opening ceremony, I announced they could have a Death Star,” Wille said. “The reaction to that is just 

‘whoa.’ It’s unforgettable. Those are the moments that

show why you’re doing this.”

During the lunch break, the students sat down with Kevin McLaughlin, the director of the Engineering Diversity Program, and UConn’s Engineering Ambassadors, to discuss their future.

“It was great that it got the kids thinking about UConn, engineering and just school in general. Now is a great age to get them. They think about it a lot in high school, because they have to. We do events to get them thinking about it, but this kind of made it real.”

Petritus said that she saw Wille speak when she toured UConn three years ago with her daughter.

“One of the stops was the testing lab with Dr. Wille. We saw him talk about concrete for 10 minutes. We both wanted to change our lives and do concrete, he was such a good speaker. After that we started talking about doing an event,” Petritus said.

“We talked over the phone, and then I invited her to visit our lab, to show her around and show her what we could do,” Wille said. “My assumption was she comes with a class of about 18 students. When we asked how many students, […] she said 110. My first reaction was ‘Wow, that’s more than I expected.’ Then it becomes ‘how can we find a good solution for this?’”

Wille said that part of the solution was to break up the eighth-graders into groups and allow his graduate students, as well as one undergraduate, to run the five events as the eighth graders rotated through the stations.

“My students did an outstanding job not only during the events but also during preparation.” he said. “They were so inviting to the middle school students and worked with them so passionately. It was a real pleasure to see how this worked out.”

Both Petritus and Wille said they hoped to have similar field trips in the future.

“I would love to do it next year,” Petritus said.

View more pictures from Concrete Day here!

Improving the Water Supply in a Drought-Stricken Village

This post originally appeared on UConn Today.

By Josh Garvey

Three UConn engineering students are working in partnership with a village in Ethiopia to help improve the water supply.

During winter break, the three students, who are all members of the UConn chapter of Engineers Without Borders, traveled to the village to begin surveying for a project to improve the community’s water infrastructure.

The village, called the Woreta Zuria Administrative Kebele, has an extensive dry season, lasting nine months of the year. The residents depend on agricultural production for their livelihood, and this year is particularly difficult for them, because of the drought that Ethiopia is experiencing.

“The community we’re working in is entirely relying on agriculture for sustenance,” says Kristin Burnham ’19 (ENG, CLAS), a double major in environmental engineering and molecular and cell biology.

Engineers Without Borders (EWB) is a student-led organization that designs and constructs sustainable engineering solutions for low income communities in the United States and abroad.

The team is at the start of a potential multi-year partnership with the village, with the town’s irrigation system being their first target for improvement. There is an irrigation system in place, says Burnham, but it is built partly with concrete and partly with dirt, and there is a lot of leakage.

This project is part of a larger partnership between UConn, the Ethiopian Institute of Water Resources, Addis Ababa University in the nation’s capital, and Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia’s Amhara National Regional State. A senior design team will work to implement the solutions that the UConn students help to design.

Jon Mellor, professor of civil & environmental engineering, who accompanied the trio on their visit in January, explains that the senior design team is working on the technical aspects of the project, while the students are working on the diverse social, logistical, and fundraising challenges of conducting projects in the developing world.

The recent trip was intended to gather as much data as possible to determine how the UConn EWB chapter could help with the town’s water issues. The data gathered will aid in designing solutions that are both sound from an engineering standpoint and fit the cultural needs of the local people.

The trip was funded by a generous donation from United Technologies Research Center, as well as fundraising efforts by the EWB UConn Chapter.

The town’s existing irrigation system runs from the Abba Samual River to the north side of town. The original plan was to build a system to service the side of the town south of the river. When the EWB team realized that the current system wasn’t fully functioning, they looked into rehabilitating that structure as well.

“We’re trying to decide if that system is worth rehabilitating and making it fully functioning,” Mellor says.

To determine the most effective way to address the community’s needs, the team tested the water and soil, surveyed the land, and marked the current irrigation system using a GPS. The Ethiopian Institute of Water Resources also supplied the team with data.

Ryan Cordier ’18 (ENG), a double major in biomedical engineering and environmental engineering, says soil tests were necessary because the plan is to build a structure on top of the soil. “We want to get a look at how the soil is going to move when we put a load on it,” he says.

Adds Burnham, “We also need to know how fast the water is going to infiltrate or absorb into the soil, so we can have an idea of whether it would be feasible to have a liner for the system built with the soil that’s already there or if we need concrete.”

This year, the strong drought affecting Ethiopia has exacerbated the village’s water problems.

“The precipitation is so variable,” says Mellor. “They typically get irrigation starting in May, but sometimes it comes and sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t come, it is pretty bad news for the community.”

The EWB students aim to address the complex issues in a holistic manner, says Kelsey Reeves ’16 (ENG), an environmental engineering major. She says the work she’s done with the chapter has helped develop her critical thinking skills.

“We basically run the program like a small engineering firm,” she says. “We make sure that what we’re designing is economical, and that it works. What’s really cool about Engineers Without Borders is that we go a step beyond [just an engineering solution]. You have to understand all these cultural and societal factors.

“You may come up with a really great solution to a problem, but if it doesn’t work on the ground, in that society, then it doesn’t matter,” she adds.

Reeves has been working on this project from the beginning, and also traveled to the village for an initial assessment with Mellor and a doctoral student last summer. When she graduates this spring, the work will be taken over by Burnham and Cordier, who were voted team officers after their part in this trip.

Mellor says the student group hopes to organize a trip this summer to begin implementing repairs and improvements to the irrigation system. That work will depend on findings from the data that was gathered over winter break.

To support the UConn Engineers Without Borders chapter, contact Jon Mellor at mellorj@engr.uconn.edu.

Bringing Crash Reporting Into The 21st century

By Kristi Allen

Connecticut is in the middle of a quiet revolution in the way it handles data from traffic crashes around the state, and UConn is at the forefront of the transition.

The Connecticut Transportation Safety Research Center (CTSRC), part of the Connecticut Transportation Institute, has spent the past two years working in collaboration with the Connecticut Department of Transportation (ConnDOT) in the development of an award-winning system for storing and analyzing Connecticut’s crash data.

“Our goal is to give the Department of Transportation the tools they need to prevent crashes from happening in the future and make the transportation network safer,” said CTSRC Director Eric Jackson.

ConnDOT, together with CTSRC, was recently awarded the Association of Transportation Safety Information Professional’s Best Practices Award for their innovations in crash data handling. The CTSRC also received the Bright Idea Seal from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, earlier this year.

In addition to this national recognition of their work, CTSRC has also received a $10 million grant from the U.S. DOT to build new tools and software that will allow them to expand the safety analysis and traffic engineering capabilities of the repository. It builds on the crash data collection program by creating a data/safety analysis system to identify and track areas in the state with safety issues. ConnDOT can then use the system to propose countermeasures, estimate their impact on safety, and track them to see if they’re successful.

“We work to prevent crashes before they happen through intelligent and responsive planning. The partnership with the CTSRC has given us the opportunity to expand the functionality of the repository. The tools they created have allowed us to analyze more crash data than ever before and use this data to make informed decisions,” said Tom Maziarz, chief of ConnDOT’s Bureau of Policy and Planning.

The center published 20 years’ worth of crash records, which has made the data on crashes instantly available to law enforcement,ConnDOT engineers, highway safety advocates and the general public. Anyone can search, analyze and download detailed crash statistics at http://www.ctcrash.uconn.edu/.

The Connecticut team consisting of ConnDOT staff, software consultants and Jackson’s team at UConn started by taking a 20-year-old crash report and developing a modernized State crash reporting system. The goal was to align Connecticut’s system with national crash data guidelines, known as Model Minimum Uniform Crash Criteria Guideline (MMUCC), and to leverage efficiencies gained with electronic reporting. The UConn team was responsible for developing a digital repository to store the state’s crash data and training law enforcement personnel on digital reporting, as well as assisting the ConnDOT with the elimination of the two year backlog of crash reports.

“We went out and trained every single police department in the state,” said Jackson. Three retired police officers were hired to help with transitioning the departments to the new software, which the CTSRC also provided grants for.

Between faster, more efficient reporting and hiring 35 of UConn students to help with data entry, the CTSRC was able to assist the ConnDOT in reducing the backlog of crash reports from 16 months down to 60 days. The goal is to reduce turnaround down to 10 days, which Jackson says they are on track to meet.

“Up until Jan 1 of this year, 70 percent of the data was received on paper. We’re at the point now where every police department is submitting electronically. We’ve achieved the 100 percent submission rate that we wanted,” said Jackson.

“There’s only 3 or 4 states where 100 percent of their crashes are submitted electronically, and almost no other state with 20 years of accessible data,” he said. Connecticut is an innovator in this field and it’s attracting national attention. “One of the unintended positive effects of the data repository is that more people are doing transportation research on Connecticut because our data is so extensive and complete.”

In Connecticut, the primary users of the data repository will be ConnDOT engineers and law enforcement officials, although the data will also be useful to local planning organizations, researchers, highway safety advocates and the general public.

“The majority of the analysis is going to take place here at UConn and at the DOT. We’re showing users how to do the crash analysis,” said Jackson.

Jackson says the next step will be to expand the crash data repository to include information on tickets, DUI’s and other traffic citations. This will allow police and government officials to see the effects of different policies on driver behavior.

“With this data, we’ll be able to see how our efforts are helping to change behaviors that cause crashes,” he said.

Jackson says the CTSRC has been instrumental in taking Connecticut from outdated paper reporting to one of the nation’s best crash reporting systems in just two years because “the DOT engaged UConn and this was our dedicated job. We were able to focus on this project and we had the support we needed to complete it.”

ConnDOT Commissioner James Redeker has been very supportive of the initiative. “Working in collaboration with UConn has allowed us to completely transform the infrastructure for collecting and analyzing crash data. Connecticut is one of the few states with all-digital reporting and we’re leading the country with one of the most advanced crash reporting systems. We’re excited to learn more about what we can do with this data and continue to expand our capabilities.”