A large US retailer that procures transportation services from third-party carriers experienced an unexpected jump in fuel surcharges as the price of diesel fuel skyrocketed in the summer of 2008. As a result, it sought to limit its future exposure to diesel price risk. We collaborated with this retailer to create a lane assignment optimizer (LAO) that incorporates diesel price risk when select...

The design of a new laboratory facility for evaluating the structural response of small-diameter buried pipes (e.g., leachate collection pipes in landfills) is presented. The pipe is tested within a 2.0 m wide, 2.0 m long, and 1.6 m high prism of soil, subject to large vertical pressures (1000 kPa), with only minimal roughness and deflection of the lateral boundaries. Results from finite elemen...

Abstract One of the crucial factors that has gained widespread popularity during tunnelling construction process is face stability tunnel mainly depends upon support pressure to be applied at against overburden and surcharge loading acting on earth surface. In this study, different cross sections tunnels been investigated in cohesionless soil (loose medium dense sand) using Finite Element Analy...

Poor understanding of the flow behavior granular biomass material poses great challenges for bioenergy industry, as equipment functioning time is significantly reduced by handling issues like screw feeder clogging and hopper arching. In this work, loblolly pine chips, including mass rate critical outlet width, in a wedge-shaped investigated combining physical experiments numerical simulations. ...

Prefabricated vertical drain (PVD) combined with preloading is one way to deal soft soil conditions. The predicted settlement becomes the first information in designing surcharge, PVD configuration and depth, time required complete consolidation. Prediction of consolidation that using one-dimensional theory considerably underestimated field along construction surcharge placement stage. This pap...

The socio-demographic patterns, behavioural and predominant causes of smoking tobacco among construction workers were explored using data from Savar, Dhaka, Bangladesh sites. A mixed questionnaire based on the basic patterns such as sex, age, education, marital status, average monthly income, family size etc. addiction/habit, peer pressure, personal/family/occupational stress relief was prepare...

The bearing capacity factors for a rough strip footing placed on rock media, which is subjected to pseudo-static horizontal earthquake body forces, have been determined using the lower bound finite element limit analysis in conjunction with power cone programming (PCP). mass assumed follow generalized Hoek-Brown (GHB) yield criterion. No assumption needs be made smoothen GHB criterion and conve...