The Impact of Providing Surface Cover on the Soil Loss and Water Discharge under the Moderate Rainfall Event

A nation’s development purely relies on the good road infrastructure which is necessary to promote the economic growth of the country. On the other side, the detrimental effects in the form of soil loss caused by its construction cannot be neglected. Roads, regardless of their small areal periphery are equally responsible to induce higher rates of erosion when compared with the agricultural lands. This study aimed to shelter the exposed soil surface once the gradients are constructed to mitigate undesirable siltation which raises water muddiness and worsens water carrying capacity of the stream channels. To cope with this issue a full scale field test was conducted on three plots which resembles the road embankments (~30°) provided with the different percentage of land covers i.e. Plot A (fully grass covered surface), Plot B (bare surface), and Plot C (50% of the grass covered surface). The soil loss examined was sandy loam. The sediment loss was observed manually at the catchment outlet of each plot whereas, the volume rate of water flow was observed in the designed bottom container. The runs were conducted for 2 hours under the simulated rainfall events of 52 mm hr-1. The impact of simulated rainfall on the soil loss was nullified by Plot A, the soil loss was severe for Plot B, and Plot C showed preeminent results in restricting soil from flowing away. Whereas, the values of water discharge were found varying for all the plots at different time intervals which are further discussed in this paper. Keywords: erosion by water, water discharge, exposed soil surface, land cover, simulated rainfal

Used engine oil as alternate binder for buildings – a comparative study

At present, global warming and climate change are the major challenges of foremost significance that substantially influence the earth's environment. The construction sector, especially buildings, is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Conventional building materials such as clay bricks and cement are considered as environmentally unfriendly due to enormous emissions during their production. This paper investigates the utilisation of used engine oil (UEO) as an alternative to the usual cementitious binders. Prototypes were produced from UEO to optimise the compositions and conditions of the process and tested for compressive and flexural strength, permeability and water absorption, respectively, following the ASTM standards. Furthermore, environmental and weathering aspects were also demonstrated to ensure the feasibility of the product. Samples constituting 5% by weight UEO have shown significant results for flexural stress, compressive strength and water absorption and also passed the permeability test. Moreover, 5% of UEO samples have negligible effect in strength for accelerated weathering conditions as demonstrated by the ultraviolet test. Conclusively, UEO can be used as a replacement to conventional binding materials such as a clay bricks and cement. Sustainable development and waste management are the hallmarks of this research. </jats:p

A review of safety guidelines for vehicles in floodwaters

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in International Journal of River Basin Management on 2019, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/15715124.2019.1687487The development of guidelines for the design and analysis of street drainage systems to ensure safety of pedestrians and vehicles is an issue of fundamental importance. To prevent pedestrians and vehicles from being swept away during flooding events, the up to date guidelines are recommended in Australian Rainfall and Runoff (AR&R, 2011) report. These guidelines are based on the upper bounds on both depth and velocity; and the constant limiting velocity × depth (v·y) functions derived from the earlier works (1967–1993) associated with the stability of old-fashioned vehicles (static condition). The AR&R (2011) guideline does not include the assessment of the studies on modern vehicles (static) which were published very close or after its release (2010–2017). However, as a result of considerable modifications in the chassis design since those former investigations, several issues concerning stability of modern vehicles in floodwaters have been raised. Herein this paper ponders on both the limit functions highlighted in those earlier and recent works. Further, the reported works have highlighted that the studies performed on vehicles in the past were limited to static condition, therefore in this paper an attempt has been made to address hydrodynamic response of a non-static vehicle endangered by floodwaters. Thus, the algorithms of the hydrodynamic studies for the non-static vehicle into safe stability limits will be presented, under the consideration of few modified parameters, which involves the rolling resistance generated at vehicle tires, drag impact at vehicle’s front end and driving force caused by vehicle enginePeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Impact and Mitigation Strategies for Flash Floods Occurrence towards Vehicle Instabilities

This chapter presents a flood risk management system for vehicles at roadways, developed from extensive experimental and numerical studies on the impact of flash floods towards vehicle instabilities. The system, easily addressed as FLO-LOW, developed to contradict the assumptions that a vehicle would be able to protect the passengers from the flood impact. Herein the hydrodynamics of flows moving across these roads coupled with the conditions of a static car that would result in vehicle instabilities has been studied. In an attempt to prevent fatalities in commonly flooded areas, permanent structures are installed to warn users regarding water depth at the flooded areas. The existing flood monitoring system only focuses on water conditions in rivers or lake in order to determine risks associated with floods. Thus, there is a need for a better system to understand and quantify a mechanism to determine hydrodynamics instability of a vehicle in floodwaters. FLO-LOW enables the road users to input their vehicle information for a proper estimation of safety limits upon crossing the flood prone area. Preferably, the system enables road users to describe and quantify parameters that might cause their vehicles to become vulnerable to being washed away as they enter the flooded area

Application of hybrid intelligent systems in predicting the unconfined compressive strength of clay material mixed with recycled additive

A reliable prediction of the soil properties mixed with recycled material is considered as an ultimate goal of many geotechnical laboratory works. In this study, after planning and conducting a series of laboratory works, some basic properties of marine clay treated with recycled tiles together with their unconfined compressive strength (UCS) values were obtained. Then, these basic properties were selected as input variables to predict the UCS values through the use of two hybrid intelligent systems i.e., the neuro-swarm and the neuro-imperialism. Actually, in these systems, respectively, the weights and biases of the artificial neural network (ANN) were optimized using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and imperialism competitive algorithm (ICA) to get a higher accuracy compared to a pre-developed ANN model. The best neuro-swarm and neuro-imperialism models were selected based on several parametric studies on the most important and effective parameters of PSO and ICA. Afterward, these models were evaluated according to several well-known performance indices. It was found that the neuro-swarm predictive model provides a higher level of accuracy in predicting the UCS of clay soil samples treated with recycled tiles. However, both hybrid predictive models can be used in practice to predict the UCS values for initial design of geotechnical structures

Quasi-Static Indentation of Reinforced Thermoplastic Pipe (RTP)

Reinforced Thermoplastic Pipe (RTP) is a type of flexible composite pipe that extensively being used in Oil &amp; Gas Industry, it possesses a huge potential as a replacement of commercial carbon steel pipe, especially in high corrosive environment. However, the commercial design of RTP does not consider the effect of lateral load from external interference. In the quasi-static indentation test conducted, the maximum local deformation recorded is 62.5 mm at lateral load of 16.1 kN. However, the effect of elastic rebound reduced 92% of the maximum deformation to produce a permanent dent of 5 mm, it can be hypothesized that a dent in RTP might not represent the actual degradation of RTP. This paper discussed the procedure, response and degradation of RTP when subjected to lateral compressive load in a Quasi-static environment