Supervising Faculty: Alexandra Hain

Project Title: UHPC Encasement for Steel Bridge Girder Repair

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 30

Description of Work: Corrosion at beam ends is one of the most pressing challenges in the maintenance of aging steel bridges. To tackle this challenge, the Connecticut Department of Transportation (CTDOT) partnered with the University of Connecticut to develop a repair for corroded beam ends using ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC). The repair involves welding shear studs to the intact portions of the web and encasing the beam end with UHPC. This provides an alternate load path for bearing forces that bypasses the corroded regions of the beam. This project involves experimental testing of various stud layouts to determine the capacity of different repair configurations.

Supervising Faculty: Shinae Jang

Project Title: Wireless structural monitoring of Connecticut's highway bridges

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 10

Description of Work: This position seeks a passionate undergraduate student who can contribute to the sustainability and resilience of our nation's infrastructure. Due to extreme thermal fluctuation and winter storms, Connecticut's bridges are suffering aging and degradation. By frequently monitoring the behaviors of bridges over time, and analyzing the data for bridge's information, we can be better informed about bridges' condition and needs for maintenance.

Supervising Faculty: Ramesh B. Malla 

Project Title: Design and Analysis of Lunar and Deep Space Habitat Structures 

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 40

Description of Work: The research team supervised by Prof. Ramesh B. Malla intends to host two students with competencies in physics, math, and structural and mechanics-related engineering fundamental knowledge. Students at the level of Junior or Senior are preferred. The students should have relevant coursework on mechanics, structural analysis, design, modeling, and construction materials. These competencies are necessary to contribute to the research of development and analysis of Space structures/habitats, and construction of a physical testbed, meant to simulate a Lunar habitat and associated environmental hazards. This research requires working with computer models to simulate conditions experienced on the Lunar surface (including temperature fluctuations, meteorite impact, and radiation), construction of a model Lunar habitat for physical testing, and working closely with other researchers in the lab to deliver models and reports. Students with MATLAB and/or other computer programming and experience with structural design and analysis software are preferred.  Successful applicants stand to gain exposure to professionals in industry and government agencies, get the opportunity to work on NASA-funded projects researching deep space structures/habitats, improve their knowledge of structural analysis and design, and gain experience working in a research environment.  

Supervising Faculty: Ramesh B. Malla 

Project Title: Analysis, Modeling, Testing, and Monitoring of Railroad and Highway Bridge Infrastructure

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 40

Description of Work: The research team supervised by Prof. Ramesh B. Malla intends to host two students with a good understanding of physics, math, structural, and mechanics-related engineering fundamental knowledge.  The student would have the opportunity to work on a project funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) University Transportation Center (UTC) - Transportation Infrastructure Durability Center (TIDC).   The research team’s current effort includes finite element modeling, analysis, and testing of railroad bridges to study dynamic behavior and to develop suitable structural health/condition monitoring systems for the bridge structures. Students at the level of Junior or Senior are preferred. The students should have relevant coursework on mechanics, structural analysis, design, modeling, and experience with structural design and analysis software engineering computer software. Successful applicants will gain exposure to industry and government agency professionals and get the opportunity to utilize their classroom knowledge to solve real-life problems, improve their knowledge on structural dynamics, analysis, and design, and gain experience working in a research environment.  

Supervising Faculty: Kay Wille, Marisa Chrysochoou

Project Title: Pyrrhotite Oxidation in Crumbling Concrete Foundations 

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 40

URA Duties and Responsibilities: The URA will work with a group of graduate and undergraduate students to assist with various laboratory analyses of concrete samples, as well as preparation and execution of laboratory experiments.

Supervising Faculty: John Ivan, Eric Jackson, Jin Zhu, Monika Filipovska, Davis Chacon Hurtado

Project Title: Assessing the Suitability of Wejo Mobility Intelligence Data for Transportation Research Applications

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 40

URA Duties and Responsibilities: Connected vehicles (CVs) offer the ability to collect data from individual vehicles on a scale and resolution that has been impossible in the past. Most vehicles manufactured since 2015 use onboard telematics devices with a cellular connection back to the manufacturer (OEM), collecting high-resolution information including spatial location and vehicle dynamics about each vehicle trip. However, given that this type of data is extremely new, untested, and few agencies have access to it, we have the timely opportunity to investigate how this data can be utilized to enhance our current operational and safety analytics, and how it can be integrated with other data sources from across the state to leverage their potential for innovative research projects. Wejo is the global leader in Mobility Intelligence (the trade terminology for this kind of information), collecting, organizing, protecting, and enhancing mobility data from all major OEMs in the world, and making them available for analysis. Wejo is currently the only multi-source platform to license unique data from CVs, collecting data from a growing base of 10.7 million vehicles. Thus far Wejo has collected over 354 billion miles of travel and 9.1 trillion data points over 44.4 billion trips, including vehicles traveling here in Connecticut. CV data can provide information relevant to various facets of transportation research including vehicle and driving dynamics, traffic operations, travel demand and patterns and traveler behavior. We are proposing to work with a small but comprehensive sample of data to determine the value for future applications and generate preliminary results and analytic methods that would be used to generate highly innovative and competitive proposals which contain larger budgets to obtain statewide data, wider time frames, or special weather and traffic event data.

Supervising Faculty: Davis Chacon Hurtado 

Project Title: Transportation Equity and the Clean Energy Transition in Latin America: Challenges and Opportunities.

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 20

URA Duties and Responsibilities: The Engineering for Human rights (ENG-HR) initiative is searching for one undergraduate research assistant to work on topics related to transportation equity, energy, and rapid urbanization in the context of Latin American cities. The job includes collecting and tabulating data, mapping & creating GIS dashboards, helping with literature reviews, coordinating meetings, and writing reports (e.g., models, charts, tables, abstracts). The candidate will work closely with assistant research professor Davis Chacon Hurtado and interact with researchers at the Human Rights Institute and the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. We are looking for highly motivated individuals interested in performing research tasks at the intersection of sustainable development, human rights, and engineering.

Supervising Faculty: John Ivan 

Project Title: Driving Simulator Study of the Safety Effectiveness of Forward Collision Warning Systems

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 40

Description of Work: In this study, driving simulation scenarios will be generated where participating drivers would be exposed to road and traffic conditions deliberately designed to test their responses to unexpected forward obstacles when they get warnings from an FCW system or when there is no system. The driving simulation system will capture the resulting simulated vehicle trajectory information to quantify the results of each driver's response to these stimuli. This study will answer the following research question: What is the safety benefit of a forward collision warning system for typical driving conditions and a range of potential hazards? Near crashes, also known as serious conflicts, will be used as a surrogate for crashes to represent quantitative safety, because crashes are expected to be extremely rare given the number of drivers that will be observed in the experiment and also will be challenging to identify in the driving simulation environment. The undergraduate student working on this project would assist a graduate student in administering the driving simulation experiments with participants.

Supervising Faculty: Baikun Li

Project Title: Water sensor development continuous monitoring of water quality

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 31

Description of Work: This undergraduate student will work with my Ph.D students for both lab tests and field tests of water sensor developments. He/she will also participate in paper writing based on this research initiative.

Supervising Faculty: Guiling Wang 

Project Title:  Cold season stream flow and flooding

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 30

URA duties and responsibilities: The student will conduct analysis of streamflow in New England rivers based on USGS data, identify major flooding or high flow events, separate direct runoff from baseflow, and analyzing recent trend of winter storm runoff.

Supervising Faculty: Nefeli Bompoti, Marisa Chrysochoou 

Project Title:  Technical Assistance for Brownfields Program

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 30

URA Duties and Responsibilities: Download flyer

Supervising Faculty: Nefeli Bompoti, Marisa Chrysochoou 

Project Title:  Contaminant fate and transport studies

Weekly Hours Available: Up to 20

URA Duties and Responsibilities: The URA will work with a graduate student to complete sorption studies for hexavalent chromium on artificial and real soils, with the goal of building fate and transport models for contaminants in the subsurface