Structural steel plate products such as buried bridges, culverts, and pipes, are entering states of distress. Present day, little is known about the severity of the different deterioration mechanisms occurring in these structures and even less is known on how rehabilitate them accordingly. The following proposed research project will investigate the deterioration and rehabilitation of these structures.
The scope of this research is to develop new equations for the load distributions beneath timber mats from a crawler crane, for various types of soil, by using numerical software. This would enable industrials to accurately estimate the behavior of stresses in soils, in order to reduce the costs of ground preparation for cranes by using fewer layers of timber mats, or reducing the amount of remedial ground work that may be needed under current calculation methods.
Nowadays, massive timber floor/roof systems are designed by a simplified approach that treats the floor/roof and the supporting beams separately, thus ignoring the composite action between these two elements. Including the composite action in the calculations has the potential to increase the stiffness of the systems and to make their design more competitive and cost-effective. The key to achieve the composite action is to have a very stiff connection between the members.
This research aims in utilizing agriculture wastes in production of sustainable eco-friendly construction materials for farms building. The mechanical and durability performance of the proposed eco-friendly construction material exposed to the aggressive agriculture environment will be evaluated. The research will investigate the effects of different factors mainly related to physical properties of used wastes and binding materials.
Building design is a complex and iterative process that requires collaboration between designers from numerous disciplines. Quality of design has a direct impact on the project success and poor-quality designs are the leading cause of project delays, reworks, and cost overruns. This research aims to improve the quality of design by focussing on two themes: addressing the design coordination issues faced and getting design inputs related to constructability and maintainability from relevant end-users.
In Canada, being one of the coldest countries in the world, buildings consume about 40% of national energy demand and in the western part of the country, particularly on Vancouver Island, many buildings do not meet current seismic code requirements. Hence, simultaneous building energy and seismic retrofit options can produce significant savings for building occupants and also help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, earthquake damage potential and associated environmental impacts.
Managing construction projects can be a challenging task as they are subject to change and comprised of numerous work packages. Understanding project outputs in the early phases of a project can assist project managers to make informed decisions and take timely corrective actions to deliver projects on-time and on-budget. In the applicant's doctoral research project, a Markov model was developed to enhance the accuracy of project cost forecasting through the integration of historical performance data.
An innovative tool is proposed to integrate agile risk, alert, team, safety, and digital data infrastructure management into a Micro Engineering Tech Inc. (METI) current structural health monitoring system (SHM), mobile mapping system (MMS), and building information modeling (BIM) that will be called Agile Monitoring Tool. Agile Monitoring Tool includes a comprehensive project management software (CPMS) package that consists of three systems as follows. First is an SHM; the structure health monitoring development was originally part of a past successful R&D project. Second is a MMS.
This research work will collect data from various concrete bridges to determine the structural heath of the bridges. These data will be analysed, and a report will be provided to MEDA Engineering & Technical Services with recommendation on rehabilitation and strengthening actions needed for various components of these bridges. This research project will also develop a new strengthening technique for bridge girders that are weak in transferring shear load. A postdoctoral fellow will be hired to execute this project with the supervision of Dr.
In order to address issues with affordable housing, new innovative approaches to construction are being developed which require customized feedback using smart data solutions. This research aims to develop the necessary software and hardware configuration to enable designers to optimize their decision making in design, construction and operations of single-unit and multi-unit residential buildings.
