Civil & Environmental Engineering

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    Sensor-Augmented Lightning Mitigation; Implications for Risk at Hydraulic Fracturing Storage Facilities
    (2015) Rooke, Sterling; Skibniewski, Miroslaw J.; Fuhr, Peter L.; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Hydraulic Fracturing (hydro fracking) has revolutionized oil and gas production in the United States. Controversy has been widespread and plenty of uncertainty remains commonplace in the public. The topic of hazardous chemicals and pollution associated with hydro fracking will be presented in some detail. However, the key focus will be on sensors and lightning mitigation at produced hydrocarbon storage batteries. Unmitigated fires and explosions will be shown to cause $10 million per direct strike in some lightning risk zones. Lightning has stood as an unresolved threat to hydrocarbon storage facilities for over 100 years. Literature research has shown that 33% of all modern hydrocarbon tank accidents are due to lightning (Chang and Lin, 2006); in addition, cloud-ground lightning strikes are predicted to increase by 50% this century (Romps et al., 2014). An overlay of the current National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) risk map and the Energy Information Administration (EIA) shale play map clearly show the lightning threat only increasing with the migration of future shale activities. While planning may change, shale deposits and regional lightning threats are not changing geographically; this research quantifies the threat and outlines clear lightning mitigation strategies. Furthermore, real-time detection and the associated methodology of lightning mitigation have implications for industries far beyond hydro fracking. By leveraging industrial standards for Fire and Gas Systems (FGS) such as IEC 61511, the proposed lightning effects mitigation system has a pathway toward verification and eventual validation at a broad array of industrial sites. Some extended applications included Navy fuel storage depots and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) facilities.
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    AVIATION CONGESTION MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENTS IN MODELING THE PREDICTION, MITIGATION, AND EVALUATION OF CONGESTION IN THE NATIONAL AIRSPACE SYSTEM
    (2014) Vlachou, Kleoniki; Lovell, David J.; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The air transportation system in the United States is one of the most complex systems in the world. Projections of increasing air traffic demand in conjunction with limited capacity, that is volatile and affected by exogenous random events, represent a major problem in aviation system management. From a management perspective, it is essential to make efficient use of the available resources and to create mechanisms that will help alleviate the problems of the imbalance between demand and capacity. Air traffic delays are always present and the more air traffic increases the more the delays will increase with very unwanted economic impacts. It is of great interest to study them further in order to be able to more effectively mitigate them. A first step would be to try to predict them under various circumstances. A second step would be to develop various mechanisms that will help in reducing delays in different settings. The scope of this dissertation is to look closer at a threefold approach to the problem of congestion in aviation. The first effort is the prediction of delays and the development of a model that will make these predictions under a wide variety of distributional assumptions. The work presented here is specifically on a continuum approximation using diffusion methods that enables efficient solutions under a wide variety of distributional assumptions. The second part of the work effort presents the design of a parsimonious language of exchange, with accompanying allocation mechanisms that allow carriers and the FAA to work together quickly, in a Collaborative Decision Making environment, to allocate scarce capacity resources and mitigate delays. Finally, because airlines proactively use longer scheduled block times to deal with unexpected delays, the third portion of this dissertation presents the assessment of the monetary benefits due to improvements in predictability as manifested through carriers' scheduled block times.