Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Engineering
Forty+ Years of Post-Earthquake Reconnaissance: Methodological Evolution Across Three Phases of EEFIT Activity
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Over four decades, the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) has undertaken around 50 missions in around 35 countries, evolving from a structural-engineering field programme into a hybrid platform integrating fieldwork, remote sensing, community-based data collection, and longitudinal return studies. Founded in 1982 as a joint venture between UK academic institutions and the [...]
Assembly areas as urban infrastructure: disaster governance, spatial equity, and the protection of public open space in seismically exposed cities
Published: 2026-05-11
Subjects: Engineering, Physical and Environmental Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Disaster assembly areas - designated open spaces where populations gather following a major earthquake - represent a critical but neglected component of urban resilience infrastructure. Using Istanbul as a primary case study, this Perspective examines how assembly area provision has been systematically eroded through routine planning decisions made outside the disaster management apparatus. Our [...]
Adaptive Turbine Replacement Improves Hydropower Flexibility in a Changing Climate
Published: 2026-05-11
Subjects: Engineering
Hydropower Plants (HP) will operate under new conditions as water regimes shift, reservoir operating rules evolve, and the grid requires flexible balancing of wind and solar. HP turbine systems are traditionally designed to operate at the highest efficiency within narrow ranges of flow and reservoir levels while deviations from design conditions can degrade HP efficiency and trigger failures, [...]
Engineered Closed-Loop Mineral Storage (ECLMS): A Conceptual Korean CCS Model Bridging Ex-situ Mineralization and Geological Storage
Published: 2026-05-11
Subjects: Engineering
The expansion of Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the European Union's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) has sharpened global expectations for permanence, traceability, and accounting integrity in carbon capture and storage (CCS). At the same time, several major industrial economies — including the Republic of Korea, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia — face a structural deficit of [...]
An analogue-conditioned multi-satellite framework for daily precipitation reconstruction
Published: 2026-05-10
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Precipitation is a key component of the Earth system, yet remains difficult to reconstruct accurately due to its stochastic nature, physical drivers, and sparse observational coverage. Existing gridded datasets rely on trade-offs between station-based observations, satellite retrievals, and multi-source blending, often introducing inconsistencies and temporal limitations. Here, we present an [...]
Dataset for Integrated Petrophysical Analysis and 3-D Geological Model Development of the Bakken Unconventional Reservoir (Sanish Field)
Published: 2026-05-10
Subjects: Engineering
The Bakken Formation in the Williston Basin remains one of the most unconventional plays in North America, yet accurate reservoir characterization continues to be challenged by significant lithological heterogeneity, particularly within the Middle Bakken and Three Forks intervals. This study presents an integrated petrophysical analysis and 3-D geocellular model development for the Sanish field, [...]
Antimicrobial Resistance – A Growing Global Groundwater Challenge
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Antimicrobials are composed of medications such as antibiotics and antivirals which are widely used to ensure human and animal health. However, inappropriate use of antimicrobials is a major driver of antimicrobial resistance. AMR arises from complex interactions between humans, animals, microbial organisms, medicines, wildlife and the environment. Once in the wastewater stream, antibiotics are [...]
Enhancing the Generalization of Flood Susceptibility Models: A Leakage-Aware Ensemble Framework for Deltaic Landscapes
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
Flood susceptibility mapping (FSM) is a cornerstone of disaster risk reduction in low-lying deltaic regions; however, conventional machine learning (ML) applications frequently suffer from spatial data leakage, resulting in inflated performance metrics and unreliable hazard predictions. To address this critical methodological shortcoming, this study develops a robust, leakage-aware ML framework [...]
From 2D labels to 3D structure: Scalable label transfer and benchmarking of 3D vegetation models in rangeland ecosystems
Published: 2026-05-03
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing
Three-dimensional (3D) characterisation of vegetation structure at the level of individual growth forms is critical for understanding ecosystem function and resilience, yet remains challenging in rangelands because vegetation is sparse, low-stature, and structurally heterogeneous. Recent 3D deep-learning models perform strongly in forests, but their transfer beyond closed-canopy benchmarks is [...]
High-Alkalinity Algal Cultivation with Direct Air Capture: An Economic Feasibility Analysis
Published: 2026-05-03
Subjects: Engineering
Weather variability and CO₂ supply costs remain key barriers to the commercial viability of algal biofuel production. Recent experimental work has demonstrated that the algae Chlorella sp. strain SLA-04 achieves high productivity in extreme alkaline growth media (pH greater than 10), where the solution chemistry enables direct capture of atmospheric CO₂, eliminating the need for costly CO₂ [...]
Rules-Based Systems Modeling for Hydropower Forecasting in Multi-Objective Reservoir Systems: Application to California's Central Valley Project
Published: 2026-05-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Hydropower from large multi-objective reservoirs and water management projects constitutes the bulk of global reservoir-based generation. Yet accurate forecasting remains challenging because generation is governed not only by hydrology but by complex institutional rules, environmental regulations, and infrastructure constraints. This study demonstrates that a rules-based systems modeling [...]
Detecting and Explaining Persistent Road Underdevelopment in Greater Accra Region Using Multi-Temporal Geospatial Data and Machine Learning
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Uneven transport infrastructure development remains a persistent challenge in rapidly urbanising cities, where disparities in road conditions shape mobility, accessibility, and socio-economic op-portunities. In Greater Accra, Ghana, rapid urban expansion has produced a road network character-ised by strong spatial inequalities, with many neighbourhood roads remaining unpaved despite sur-rounding [...]
Towards Prospective Disaster Risk Management: Mapping Multi-hazard Urban Risk Dynamics Driven by Evolving Exposure and Vulnerability via Earth Observation
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Other Computer Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Risk Analysis, Spatial Science, Structural Engineering
As local governments increasingly adopt geospatial Climate and Disaster Risk Assessment (CDRA) to inform prospective public policy, the reliability of existing static risk intelligence is challenged by the continuous evolution of building exposure, population distribution, and physical vulnerability. Recent multi-temporal datasets of the built environment, derived from Earth Observation and [...]
Closing the Duration Gap in RVT: The Energetic Duration
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Duration is a fundamental descriptor of earthquake ground motion, yet it remains ill-defined across engineering seismology, with numerous threshold-based measures adopted for specific applications. This ambiguity has allowed duration to function as a calibration parameter in analyses such as random vibration theory (RVT), where it is often adjusted to match observed response spectra. This paper [...]
Non-Federal Climate Leadership Can Sustain U.S. Emissions Reductions Under Federal Policy Uncertainty
Published: 2026-04-27
Subjects: Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recent federal climate policy rollbacks in the United States have slowed progress toward high-ambition climate targets under the Paris Agreement. In the absence of federal climate leadership, there is a growing need to better understand the potential impacts of non-federal climate action. We assess the impacts of recent changes in federal policy, non-federal climate leadership, and potential [...]