At the end of each term, as I watch the Civil and Environmental Engineers at Pitt present their final reports after a semester of participation in the Senior Design Project program, I feel optimistic about the future. If these students are typical of young adults across our country, we will prosper.
The program is structured to permit multi-discipline teams to provide design solutions to “near-real-world” problems. This semester they had ten five-person teams working on a broad variety of projects.
Two of them were based on future PennDOT projects; in both cases PennDOT District 11 representatives provided valuable service as mentors. Close to home was a project designing one of the components of the proposed modifications to the Bridgeville I-79 interchange — the addition of a dedicated south-bound ramp and bridge over Chartiers Creek for traffic heading west on Route 50, with the goal of reducing that source of congestion. This team included Construction Management, Structures, and Transportation students.
Further in the future is a PennDOT project to reconstruct or replace the “Frazier Street Bridge”. This is the long (one thousand feet) deck truss bridge that carries the Parkway East over Junction Hollow, heading for the Squirrel Hill Tunnels. The Parkway carries 100,000 vehicles per day; work associated with the bridge must minimize disruption to this traffic. After consideration of several options, the team elected to take advantage of the fact that the existing bridge is essentially a pair of bridges in parallel. Their plan is to demolish one side while diverting traffic to the other, replace it with a plate girder deck bridge, and then repeat the process for the other side. It will be interesting to see how PennDOT eventually attacks this problem.
Another interesting project was the design of a pedestrian bridge over the Boulevard of the Allies in South Oakland. Walnut Capital is negotiating with the City of Pittsburgh regarding an ambitious development in that area, which they call Oakland Crossings. Their preliminary artist’s conceptions show a pedestrian bridge over the Boulevard, west of the intersection with Halket Street, leading to a new apartment building/parking garage complex.
The team conceived an all-weather enclosed bridge between two towers, each enclosing an ADA accessible elevator. The bridge is a handsome through truss, enclosed in glass, with a fiberglass reinforced plastic deck. One hundred feet long, it would be fabricated and assembled in a shop in Ohio, delivered and erected in one piece, with minimum disruption to traffic on the Boulevard.
Another very interesting project was a hypothetical pavilion constructed primarily of bamboo, to be constructed at the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden, adjacent to the Lotus Pond. Although this is not in the Botanical Garden’s current long-range plans, they were quite supportive of the team’s effort and complimentary about the resulting design. Bamboo is an important construction material in certain parts of the world; its durability for permanent structures here is questionable.
This is the third semester in a row that the program has done a project in conjunction with “the Perennial Project”, a group of civic-minded folks committed to the rejuvenation of the community of Brownsville. This time it was a study aimed at improving pedestrian and bicycle mobility in the “downtown” area, similar to the recent “Active Transportation Plan” presented in Bridgeville.
The design included improved pedestrian crossings, replacement of a major bridge, and construction of a dedicated ramp leading to the Monongahela River wharf. The ultimate goal is to link a number of local tourist attractions – the wharf, the historic Dunlap’s Creek Bridge, Nemacolin Castle, and a popular B&B which was the filming site for the 1984 movie, “Maria’s Lovers”.
Two projects with a Transportation focus paralleled actual projects being planned in Pittsburgh. With support from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Multimodal Transportation Fund, the City plans to convert 21st Street between Carson Street and South Side Park into a “Green Complete Street”, a pedestrian/cyclist friendly boulevard incorporating features that would minimize storm-water runoff. The team included Construction Management, Environmental, Water Resources, and Transportation students. Their proposed design was significantly more cost effective than the current concept which has been proposed by an outside consultant.
The other project was the Larimer-Homewood Multimodal Greenway Extension, the conversion of an unused right-of-way into a link between Dahlen Place and Rainbow Street, in the Bakery Square neighborhood. A team of Construction Management and Transportation students confirmed the effect this will have on reducing congestion on Penn Avenue and developed a plan to produce an artery that would be particularly friendly for foot and bicycle traffic.
A team of Construction Management and Structures students produced a construction management plan for the renovation of a major Duquesne Light building in the Woods Run neighborhood. This also mirrored an actual project being implemented, thus providing sufficient information for the team to study the problem independently.
The department provides degrees in two disciplines – Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering. The principal difference between the two is the focus on Solid Mechanics for the Civil Engineering students and on Chemistry for the Environmental Engineering students.
Two Environmental projects were presented this term. One team produced the process design for a water treatment plant serving a hypothetical recirculating aquaculture system harvesting 1,200 tons of Atlantic Salmon each year. The process included filtering, bacteria converting ammonia to nitrogen, degassing, and re-oxygenation.
The other Environmental team performed a feasibility study for the installation of a bubble curtain to remove plastic debris from a stream entering Baltimore Harbor, a concept that has been successfully applied in Amsterdam. A significant amount of research work was done in the department’s hydraulics laboratory to calibrate the process.
The common thread running through all these projects is the commitment of a talented group of young engineers to serve society by designing and maintaining our physical infrastructure in a manner that minimizes its impact on the natural environment. I am comfortable knowing our future is in their hands.