The purpose of this project was to convert the existing at-grade crossing of Brazoria County Road 56 (CR 56) and State Highway 288 (SH 288) into a diamond interchange that includes a new overpass bridge and providing access to the newly developed Meridiana Development. Coordination with TXDOT, area landowners, utility companies, and Brazoria County was integral in obtaining approval and acceptance of the project. The main design challenge for this project was to accommodate double intersections on the west side of SH 288 to tie into existing access roads with two-way traffic and a new southbound on-ramp within a close proximity. EHRA coordinated with TxDOT throughout the project from preliminary concepts for the intersection and bridge through final design and construction. Each component of this project was designed in accordance with TxDOT standards and criteria.
Identified as a top priority during the development of the District’s Parks Master Plan, this portion of trail was the first phase of over two miles of planned trails to provide connectivity and recreation for District residents.
EHRA planners, hydrologists and landscape architects worked together to propose an alternative use for the space, re-developing the basin into an amenity pond. EHRA carefully selected native plant materials for both their ability to survive in the harsh conditions of the basin as well as providing filtration for improved storm water quality.
EHRA completed a site-specific planning and visioning study for the proposed 470-acre San Jacinto Boulevard District (SJBD) in Baytown, Texas.
EHRA offered its Landscape Architectural services to complete a Parks and Trails Master Plan for the District.
The nation's aging infrastructure requires massive investment. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the U.S. needs to spend some $4.5 trillion by 2025 to fix the country's roads, bridges, dams and other infrastructure. But wait: Imagine if engineers could build structures with materials that do not degrade over time. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have proposed a new simulation technique that could help engineers do just that.
Mohammad Javad Abdolhosseini Qomi, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and engineering graduate student Ali Morshedifard have developed a numerical method to simulate the molecular aging process in amorphous materials, such as concrete and glass. This technique could help researchers not only better understand how materials weaken with age, but also develop materials that maintain their strength indefinitely. Their work appears this week in Nature Communications.
According to the researchers, aging originates at the atomic and molecular levels. Because of this miniscule scale, it's nearly impossible to track microscopic changes over long periods. "In computer simulation of materials, you would have to simulate a quadrillion time steps to capture only one second of behavior. That would not even get us close to the time scales relevant for aging phenomena, which are in the order of years and decades," explained Qomi.
In their incremental stress-marching technique, Qomi and his graduate student subject the material's molecular structure to cyclic stress fluctuations, and then follow the material's response to such perturbations. "Hydrated cement is composed of disk-like globules at the nanoscale. We serendipitously found that these globules gradually deform under sustained load, but the deformation comes to a stop after a certain period. We also found that the collective behavior of globules gives rise to a non-asymptotic deformation, which we believe to be at the origins of creep in cementitious materials. It was fascinating to see atomic origins of viscoelastic and logarithmic deformation under constant stress," said Morshedifard, the paper's lead author.
Qomi and his research team plan to apply this new technique to explore the relationship between the composition and texture of structural materials and their time-dependent behavior.
Story Source: University of California - Irvine.