Award Data

Today’s prevailing methods of visual track inspection tend to be expensive, disruptive to operations, and have potential to be less thorough than preferred. To help address these issues, machine vision technology emerged in the rail sector over a decade ago; however, the technology has not achieved its expected potential due to the uncontrolled nature of rail environments. Recent findings have s ...

Most research on scour assessment has traditionally focused on developing best-fit or envelope equations to estimate the maximum scour depths from physical experiments in a laboratory environment. However, obtaining an accurate estimate is always a challenge due to numerous uncertainties in the actual riverine or coastal environment. With advances in new surveying technologies and growing computat ...

A newly proposed combination of high-strength weathering steel sheet with Ultra-High Performance Concrete (UHPC) to leverage the benefits of both emerging technologies. The combined system offers benefits over traditional orthotropic steel decks and existing concrete or UHPC deck solutions, both of which offer high up-front costs in fabrication or forming. The resulting composite structure provide ...

Rail tank cars are routinely used to transport hazardous materials. Additionally, their use has increased appeal because pipeline construction increasingly has a political cost. Hazmat transport by rail is insecure, and the materials transported pose serious hazards to populations along railway lines in derailments and/or collisions, including fire and explosion, acute and chronic toxicity to expo ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the value of a quantitative risk assessment tool for management of geohazard threats to pipelines.Phase I will determine data sources for quantitative risk assessment to support management and decision-making needs of pipeline industry stakeholders; identify the potential market for such a tool; identify a study locati ...

In-line inspection (ILI) is a cornerstone for pipeline integrity. Advances to ILI tools are essential to maintaining pipeline safety. Gaps exist for the detection of circumferential cracking (at and away from welds and dents) and bending stresses. Few technologies exist that can make reputable claims for stress measurement that are non-destructive, reliable, and appropriate for integration onto an ...

A state-of-the-art fiber-optic based multi-sensor monitoring system utilizing Distributed Strain Sensing (DSS), Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS), and Enhanced Distributed Acoustic Sensing (EDAS) will be investigated for improving the probabilistic ranking of risk models of geohazard prone sections of Natural Gas pipelines for shut down, maintenance or replacement. Both time dependent and inde ...

Crushed aggregates play an important role in the safe and reliable operation of our nation’s railroad infrastructure.Over time, aggregates become fouled by finer particles, and if not monitored and remedied, this fouling can lead to catastrophic accidents such as train derailments.A handheld inspection system that can accurately perform a quantitative measure of aggregate gradation and degree of ...

The Department of Transportation (DOT) Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) requires a secure platform with a distributed ledger on which to exchange information among motor carriers, inspection facilities, and Federal and State government facilities. Primary concerns associated with implementing a private blockchain architecture are cost-effectiveness and compliance with informatio ...

Active vibration monitoring of bridges has been shown to provide a basis for assessment of their current structural health status. Such data however have only been obtained in costly controlled tests with extensive preparation to protect individual surface mounted accelerometers or MEMS and their electrical cabling to the data processing parts. Advanced Systems & Technologies Inc., describes a non ...