In North America, most rail corridors are constructed using ballasted track. Monitoring the ballast support condition and improving upon current sub-structure/ballast maintenance strategies will ensure safe railroad operations. However, it is inherently difficult to evaluate the pressure distribution at the sleeperballast interface. Researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIU...

Railway transition zones between open track and rigid structures such as bridges and culverts often experience differential movements due to abrupt changes in track stiffness and complicated dynamic loading effects. Such conditions commonly lead to track geometry issues, consequently increasing the magnitude of impact loads at these areas. This in turn leads to excessive degradation of ballast ...

The identification and risk assessment of potential biological invaders would provide valuable criteria for the allocation of resources toward the detection and control of invasion threats. Yet, freshwater biologists have made few attempts at predicting potential invaders, apparently because such efforts are perceived to be costly and futile. We describe some simple, low-cost empirical approach...

This paper presents electronic ballast with dimming capability supplying a 32 W fluorescent lamp. The electronic ballast is a self-oscillating driving circuit with an additional circuit responsible for dimming the fluorescent lamp based on a signal from a lighting dependent resistor. This luminous sensor measures the luminous flux level and set the lamp power by the voltage gain variation of th...

SUMMARY Preventing the introduction of new invasive species should be the cornerstone of efforts to minimize their adverse ecological and economic impacts. Yet recent ballast water regulations have not slowed the rate of new invasions into the Great Lakes. This paper describes the features of a surveillance and eradication program for aquatic invasive species (AIS) in the Great Lakes. The propo...

Detection of living microalgae cells is very important for ballast water treatment and analysis. Chlorophyll fluorescence is an indicator of photosynthetic activity and hence the living status of plant cells. In this paper, we developed a novel microfluidic biosensor system that can quickly and accurately detect the viability of single microalgae cells based on chlorophyll fluorescence. The sys...

Abstract Due to practical and economic considerations, the sea transportation is increasingly in demand as a means of transporting world trade activities. The ships without cargo will use ballast water stabilizer. Ballast often carried by various foreign microorganisms that harm ecosystem. IMO promulgated 8 September 2017 Water Management (BWM) Convention prevent spread harmful pathogenic micro...

treatment Esteban M. Paolucci*, Marco R. Hernandez, Alexei Potapov, Mark A. Lewis and Hugh J. MacIsaac Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research, University of Windsor, 401 Sunset Av., Windsor, ON N9B 3P4, Canada; and Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, 632 Central Academic Building, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G1,Canada; and Department of Biological Science...