Agenda

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Tuesday
August 9, 2022

(In-Person Only)
Wells Conference Center
University of Maine

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Wednesday
August 10, 2022

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Thursday
August 11, 2022

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Official Agenda

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Presentation Abstracts

Key Attributes of FRP Composites for Infrastructure Applications – There is an extremely good fit between Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (FRP) composites and the present and future infrastructure needs of our nation and the world. This presentation will illustrate the weight benefits, ease of installation, corrosion resistance, resiliency to natural disasters, and lower life cycle costs of FRP composites in applications such as bridges, piers and seawalls, water infrastructure and buildings.

Life Cycle Assessment: A Central Element and Tool for Understanding the Many Aspects of Sustainability – Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has evolved as a central element and tool for understanding the many aspects of sustainability, the experience, and the acceptance of ISO related standards by practitioners has resulted in an LCA analysis that is credible and substantiated by a peer review process. The use of a credible LCA analysis provides the user with a decision making tool to determine the best combination of the many factors associated with best design practices, manufacturing, and sustainability. Sustainability factors can range from designing for sustainability and long service life to a circular economy supply chain and environmental impact, energy, and resource usage. An overview of these factors will be discussed with LCA as the center focal point.

Looking at the Past to See the Future – In the early 1990’s, the composites industry began to explore and develop new products to solve the many issues of a deteriorating infrastructure. Composites had to develop solutions that were better that wood, concrete, steel, and aluminum. The composites industry responded with many products, however the road to acceptance was long and not easy. This presentation intends to capture the many developments over the years for infrastructure products and takes a look at the future of what still needs to be done to provide solutions for the infrastructure market.

Past, Present, and Future of Structural Composites – Structural composites can play a significant role in reducing overall infrastructure costs. This presentation will discuss MaineDOT’s approach to using composites to address common corrosion issues to help preserve our existing bridge inventory and build longer-lasting, more durable, new bridges. Examples of MaineDOT’s use of composites will be presented to showcase our efforts to build durable bridges, and our expectations for future use, and barriers to more widespread adoption in the transportation infrastructure industry, will be discussed.

Smart Fiber Reinforced Polymer Composite Bridge Deck For Rural Tennessee – Fiber-reinforced polymer composites are highly attractive for bridge decks due to their high strength, lightweight, resistance to corrosion, and long-term durability with 100 plus year design life. Structural health monitoring is critical for long-term assessment of the condition of the bridge structures for effectively detecting damage and actual distributions of complex loads from vehicle traffic. In this study, the strain distribution was measured using two types of fiber optic sensors bonded to the surface of a glass fiber reinforced-based composite bridge deck designed and manufactured by Structural Composites, Melbourne, FL. The fiber optic sensors obtained from Luna, Innovations, Inc., utilizing Rayleigh scattering and high spatial strain resolution were positioned strategically based on expected stress distributions to measure strain in the longitudinal, transverse, and diagonal directions along the span of the composite bridge. Fiber Bragg grating sensors monitored the dynamic or high speed vehicular loading (for example deformations from a future potential crash type event) based strain distribution. Additionally, a wireless configured sensor package was custom developed and integrated with the composite bridge located in Morgan County, Tennessee, to monitor environmental loading and mid-point displacement and correlated well with the strain distribution measurements from the fiber optic based sensors. 

The Evolution of the GBeam^TM and its Role for the Future of Transportation Infrastructure – The purpose of this presentation is to describe and show how the GBeamTM design has
changed since its initial development. It will also discuss AIT Composites upcoming
GBeamTM projects and the direction this technology is going into the future.

Taking Charge of our Carbon Neutral Concrete Future for the Transportation Industry – As an industry we understand the urgency of reducing carbon emissions but have lacked a uniform front in addressing major change and being proactive with policy changes. We have substantial opportunities to contribute to carbon reductions but the language and mindset from the public and policy makers still often centers around concrete as a villain. We have opportunities for reducing embodied carbon as well as long-term resiliency and durability solutions that are critical to the future of infrastructure. This talk will introduce the NEU Center of Excellence and how we can unite to be proactive with a common goal and real solutions that use our knowledge rather than have those outside of the concrete industry dictate less effective prescriptive solutions. By driving change we can be a leader in a carbon neutral future that recognizes the importance of our industry in resilient, sustainable solutions.

Resilience in Architected Materials-by-Design as a Means to Harness Sustainable Infrastructure – In the face of climate changes, the world’s growing population, and decaying infrastructure, there is a need to develop stronger, tougher, and more resilient civil infrastructure materials. Nature offers abundant relevant insight for developing resilient and thus sustainable engineering materials. Two primary challenges are engineering the mechanics of strong and tough design motifs found in biological materials and implementing their fabrication via advancing manufacturing processes such as additive manufacturing techniques.  This seminar presents a few strategies for the purposeful design of architected cement-based materials with higher resistance to damage and cracking, thus enabling more durable and longer-lasting infrastructure materials and structures. Development of non-conventional advanced additive manufacturing technologies such as direct-ink-writing and robotic processes across multiple scales along with materials designs such as particle packing will be presented as the potential pathways for low-carbon-footprint infrastructure materials.

The Realities of Green Stormwater Infrastructure and Flood Reductions at the Watershed Scale – As most GSI is designed around the more frequent rainfall events (the one-inch storm is common), the 24-hour, 10-year and higher return period rainfall depths in Maine is 4 or more inches, GSI is being oversold for flood control because typically after GSI systems are filled, by design the higher flows bypass the systems resulting in little if any routing of the bypassed flows. 

Prioritizing Coastal Resilience: Modeling Flood Risks in a Changing Climate –

In many coastal areas, the adverse impacts of climate change and sea-level rise may be reduced by a
careful response to the increased threat of normal tidal and storm induced flood damage. The
identification of appropriate adaptive actions depends largely on an understanding of the present and
future surge-induced flood risk. In particular, an accurate and precise assessment of the exceedance
probability of storm surge water surface elevations, provided at high spatial resolution helps decision
makers identify areas requiring immediate action and those benefitting from future vulnerability
planning. Armed with this detailed information, engineering solutions can be focused on alternatives
that are adaptable with time to provide a cost-effective investment. This presentation focuses on
development of climate change planning based on results from a federal award-winning high-resolution
dynamic, probabilistic model approach.

Resiliency in Action: Aging Infrastructure, Highway Flooding, and Coastal March Restoration at Back River Creek Marsh in Woolwich, Maine – The heavily travelled US Route 1 highway corridor crosses the Back River Creek Marsh in Woolwich, Maine. State transportation infrastructure at this crossing includes a railroad, a1930’s era bridge, a roadway embankment, and several small highway culverts. Other local (non-state) infrastructure present in the area includes a town road and culvert, a boat launch, an old dike and a public water supply line serving the city of Bath. The approximately 140-acre area of coastal marsh located upstream of Route 1 is tidally limited, and long-term monitoring at the site documented that full tidal flow is restricted by portions of the dike, the town culvert, and US Route 1. MaineDOT’s involvement at this site began with plans to design and construct a replacement structure for the 1930’s era bridge. MaineDOT subsequently joined a multi-organization partnership and feasibility study to evaluate the potential to restore tidal habitat and fish passage in Back River Marsh, protect the public drinking water supply, maintain public access and increase the resilience of this section of Route 1 to existing flooding and projected sea level rise. This unique set of conditions ultimately led to changes in the MaineDOT bridge project that included improvements in roadway safety and resiliency, and accommodations for future marsh restoration efforts by other members of the partnership.

Helical Pile Augmentation with Collar Vane: Research – This presentation will review the value proposition for Hubbell Power Systems, Inc. for new product development via academic support from TIDC.  The research focused on an add-on collar vane designed to provide increased lateral and torsional resistance for helical pile foundations.  The market verticals are DOT applications such as signage & lighting; plus moorings and anchorages for utility and offshore use.  The Phase I activity and results will be discussed, along with an explanation on how the research has led to some design changes to the collar vane. 

Implementing Geo-Innovation for Transportation Projects – The history of geotechnical engineering is rich with innovations applied to projects spanning from the ancient Egyptian pyramids to modern steel-framed structures.  In the past 25 years, Geopier Foundations has created and now leads the industry in providing innovative solutions for modern structures ranging from building foundations to fuel storage tanks to retaining walls.  This presentation will describe the hurdles in place to implementing geo-innovations in the private and now public sectors and will provide thoughts on how DOTs may benefit from these and other innovations in a sector where project procurement requires non-sole-source contracting.

Biogeotechnics from lab to field – Biogeotechnics is an emerging field in geotechnical engineering that aims to learn from nature to develop elegant, efficient and sustainable bio-based solutions for geotechnical infrastructure systems. In 2015 NSF decided to fund the Engineering Research Center on Bio-mediated and Bio-Inspired Geotechnics. Four universities joined forces to develop several of these new bio-based technologies, investigating fundamental aspects, developing tools to enable field implementation up to design and implementation of fully integrated systems through field trials and prototypes. In this contribution I will share the tools and methods that were used and the challenges that were faced to scale-up and commercialize these technologies.

Density Measurement of Asphalt Mixtures and Pavements using a Dielectric Measurement System – Air voids in asphalt mixture play an important role to ensure a balance between durability and traffic carrying capacity. As a result, current state of practice for control of asphalt mixture and pavement construction quality relies on the amount of air voids. In-situ air void measurements require either taking cored samples from the pavement or use of nuclear density measurement devices. Cored samples are time consuming, and results patched holes in newly constructed pavements, nuclear density devices require specialized operator training and device storage protocols. Lastly, both these existing methods only provide a point measurement. Dielectric profiling system has been proposed as an alternative to traditional density control methods by using a miniaturized ground penetrating radar system that are able to provide a larger coverage using simplified measurement methods. Field and laboratory use of dielectric-based asphalt mixture and pavement density measurement system will be discussed along with results of field and lab testing from a USDOT pooled fund study and NCHRP IDEA efforts.

Innovations in the Area of Concrete Pavements – Much work has been performed at the University of Pittsburgh in regard to innovations in the area of concrete pavements over the past several years.  This includes tools for assisting with the design of concrete pavements and concrete overlays as well as the construction and repair of concrete pavements.  A summary of some of these efforts will be presented.

Recent Technologies to Enhance Quality Control in Asphalt Paving – FHWA Efforts – In the asphalt pavement community, the Mobile Asphalt Technology Center serves as a crucial connector between agencies, private industry, and academia. From project site visits, customized training workshops, the equipment loan program, and technical guidance resources, MATC provides an array of technology transfer opportunities that support longer-life and more–resource effective asphalt. We are the only program of its kind. As part of the Federal Highway Administration, we are empowered with a unifying mission to improve the quality, safety, and longevity of America’s roadways. And we serve as one of FHWA’s most impressive and highly visible tools in assisting with the advancement and implementation of new technologies for long-life asphalt pavements

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Parking

Parking for Wells Conference Center is located at:
188-199 Munson Rd. Orono, ME
Signage will be located at every UMaine entrance to direct traffic

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Our 2022 Annual Conference is hybrid and will welcome both In-Person and Virtual offerings!

Live

Live attendees can take advantage of interactive panels, discussions, networking events, poster sessions, tours, and more.               

Virtual Attendance

We also welcome those who are unable to be in person. The virtual option allows for live access to the panel discussions, keynote addresses, and more. Interaction will be limited to the submission of typed questions in the Zoom Webinar Q&A feature. 

Both options allow your engagement in some cutting edge Transportation Research geared to improve your Transportation Infrastructure!