Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Civil and Environmental Engineering

A consistent terminology to communicate ground-related uncertainty

Georg H. Erharter, Suzanne Lacasse, Franz Tschuchnigg

Published: 2024-03-26
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Risk Analysis, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistics and Probability

Engineering geology is highly affected by uncertainty related to the geology, geotechnical parameters, models used and methods. While the technical aspects of ground-related uncertainty are increasingly investigated, the terminology to communicate uncertainty (i.e. phrases such as “it is very likely that”) has not yet been unified and experts use it however they see fit. The problem arises that [...]

Geospatial Modeling and Mapping of Soil Erosion in India

Ravi Raj, Manabendra Saharia, Sumedha Chakma

Published: 2024-03-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering

Soil erosion generally removes the topmost fertile layer of soil, affecting agricultural productivity on a larger scale. As a significant portion of the Indian economy depends on agricultural productivity, granular assessment of the impact of soil erosion becomes critical. However, a national-scale assessment of soil erosion and an impact classification system currently doesn’t exist over India. [...]

Fiber-based super-bridging agents improve flotation and settling during water treatment

Badr Raissouni, Mohamed Lotfi Benkara, Mathieu Lapointe

Published: 2024-03-07
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering

Increasing demand for water poses a major challenge to the water treatment industry. To maintain their floc removal efficiency, water treatment plants are expected to require larger separation units and use more chemicals, namely, coagulants and flocculants. Conventional physicochemical treatments produce flocs that are limited in size, which limits floc removal efficiency via gravitation-based [...]

Exponentially cascaded cross-sectional volume estimates from elevation data

Bastian Van den Bout, Vera Glas

Published: 2024-02-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering

The relationship between discharges and flow heights is a critical component of hydraulic modelling, often carried out involving data on the elevation profiles of the river bed. However, obtaining and using cross-sectional profile data can be resource intensive. Methods for profile estimation from rasterized elevation and bathymetry can help overcome this. In this paper, an efficient algorithm [...]

Mechanisms and seismological signatures of rupture complexity induced by fault damage zones in fully-dynamic earthquake cycle models

Joseph Flores-Cuba, Elif Oral, Benjamin Idini, et al.

Published: 2024-02-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Damage zones are common around faults, but their effects on earthquake mechanics are still incompletely understood. Here, we investigate how damage affects rupture patterns, source time functions and ground motions in 2D fully-dynamic cycle models. We find that back-propagating rupture fronts emerge in large faults and can be triggered by residual stresses left by previous ruptures or by [...]

Natural occurrence of asbestos in serpentinite quarries from Southern Spain.

Andrea Bloise, Claudia Ricchiuti, Rafael Navarro, et al.

Published: 2024-01-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Public Health

The nevado-filábride complex (NFC) (southern Spain) is well known for its widespread mining and quarrying activities. Serpentinite and metabasite rocks are extracted, processed and traded as building and ornamental stones. Due to the possible presence of natural occurrence of asbestos (NOA) in these rocks, the aim of this paper is to conduct an in-depth characterisation of fibrous minerals. To [...]

The numerical evaluation of the effect of Geotextile sample size on the behavior of reinforced cohesive soil

Kuwar khairnar, Sintash Shivde

Published: 2024-01-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering

The effect of sample size is a phenomenon that involves the dependence of resistance on the size of the tested sample, where smaller samples exhibit higher resistance compared to larger ones. Due to the importance and sensitivity of determining the resistances of laboratory samples for use in design, codes, and standards, efforts are made to minimize the effects of sample size. This issue holds [...]

A Novel Methodology for Enhancing Flood Risk Communication: The Nines of Safety

S M Samiul Islam, Ibrahim Demir

Published: 2024-01-12
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Risk Analysis

Flood risk communication helps people plan for and recover from disasters, especially in flood-prone areas. The Nines of Safety (NoS) concept described in this study provides a new perspective for flood risk communication and assessment. The NoS method can help analyze flood risk comprehensively and support decision-makers and the public understand their vulnerability under various conditions. [...]

A Hybrid Pore-Network-Continuum Modeling Framework for Flow and Transport in 3D Digital Images of Porous Media

Li Zhang, Bo Guo, Chaozhong Qin, et al.

Published: 2023-12-18
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy

Understanding flow and transport in multiscale porous media is challenging due to the presence of a wide range of pore sizes. Recent imaging advances offer high-resolution characterization of the multiscale pore structures. However, simulating flow and transport in 3D digital images requires models to represent both the resolved and sub-resolution pore structures. Here, we develop a hybrid [...]

On the economic feasibility of tidal range power plants

Konstantinos Pappas, Nguyen Quang Chien, Ilias Zilakos, et al.

Published: 2023-12-17
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering

The wave potential energy associated with tides presents a promising sustainable energy resource. Uncertainties on the economic case of tidal range power plants are a known bottleneck hindering the development of the industry. Significant costs depend on each design's general arrangement, which includes both mechanical components and the associated civil works. Research on tidal range structures [...]

Indoor and Ambient Influences on PM2.5 Exposure and Well-being for a Rail Impacted Community and Implications for Personal Protections

Ivette Torres, Khanh Do, Andrea Delgado, et al.

Published: 2023-11-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Public Health

Background. Higher air pollution emissions can be observed near rail networks, local and highway automobile corridors, and shipyards. Communities near such sources are often disproportionately exposed to emissions from these stationary and mobile sources. One such community is West San Bernardino in California, where households are feet away from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe intermodal [...]

Graphics Processing Unit Assisted Computation for a Gas-Phase Chemical Solver in a Regulatory Chemical Transport Model

Khanh Do, George Delic, Jose Rodríguez Borbón, et al.

Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering

The Earth’s atmosphere is extremely complex due to the presence of several dynamic processes, such as dispersion, diffusion, deposition, and chemical reactions. There is a pressing need to improve the predictability of air quality models by integrating more of these scientific processes with an increasing number of chemical species into the mechanisms. These enhancements degrade the computational [...]

Performance of Machine Learning for Ozone Modeling in Southern California during the COVID-19 Shutdown

Khanh Do, Arash Kashfi Yeganeh, Ziqi Gao, et al.

Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering

We combine machine learning (ML) and geospatial interpolations to create two-dimensional high-resolution ozone concentration fields over the South Coast Air Basin (SoCAB) for the entire year of 2020. Three spatial interpolation methods (bicubic, IDW, and ordinary kriging) were employed. The predicted ozone concentration fields were constructed using 15 building sites predicted by the ML method, [...]

High resolution landslide susceptibility mapping using ensemble machine learning and geospatial big data

nirdesh sharma, Manabendra Saharia, GV Ramana

Published: 2023-11-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering

Landslide susceptibility represents the potential of slope failure for given geo-environmental conditions. The existing landslide susceptibility maps suffer from several limitations, such as being based on limited data, heuristic methodologies, low spatial resolution, and small areas of interest. In this study, we overcome all these limitations by developing a probabilistic framework that [...]

Pacific shoreline erosion and accretion patterns controlled by El Niño/Southern Oscillation

Kilian Vos, Mitchell Dean Harley, Ian L Turner, et al.

Published: 2023-10-28
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

In the Pacific Basin, the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant mode of interannual climate variability, driving substantial changes in oceanographic forcing and impacting Pacific coastlines. Yet, how sandy coasts respond to these basin-scale changes has to date been limited to a few long-term beach monitoring sites, predominantly on developed coasts. Here we use 38 years of Landsat [...]

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