Greens Bayou Trail Phase 3

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.

Northpark Drive Mobility Project

EHRA completed preliminary engineering, phase one environmental site assessment and schematic development for the widening of Northpark Dr. between US 59 and Woodland Hills Dr. EHRA also provided program management, drainage analysis and design, traffic engineering, environmental documentation and schematic design for the roadway, as well as grade separation at the Loop 494/UPRR railroad crossing.

EHRA conducted traffic operations and access management studies for the Northpark Dr. corridor. This corridor is approximately 2.2 miles long and has major signalized and unsignalized intersections and driveways that access various subdivisions and industrial developments. These studies laid the groundwork for the widening of Northpark Dr. from a four-lane boulevard cross-section to a six-lane boulevard complete street. The new street design includes low impact development drainage, conventional drainage, a grade separation at the UPRR crossing with mechanically stabilized earth retaining walls, two at-grade crossings for bi-directional frontage access, reconstruction of two concrete bridges over a diversion channel, intersection improvements, a roadway-adjacent multiuse path and traffic signal improvements.

Drainage analysis and design included hydrologic and hydraulic studies of both existing and proposed conditions to demonstrate that proposed project components would not adversely affect the 100-year floodplain in the area. The roadway and traffic designs contained horizontal and vertical alignments, cross-sections, plan and profile, sidewalk and bicycle accommodations, intersection layouts, traffic control plans and signing and pavement markings.

As the program management firm, EHRA coordinated with TxDOT, UPRR, the City of Houston Council District E, COH Planning and Development Department, COH Public Works and Engineering Department, Montgomery County, Harris County, HCFCD and area residents throughout the project.

Greens Bayou Trail Phase 2

Peoples Road

EHRA conducted a traffic engineering study to identify the impacts of a proposed master development located near the intersection of FM 1488 and Peoples Road in the City of Conroe.

MUD 188

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.

6 May 2018

Anti-Aging?

Admin

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.