NJIT is Prepared to Tackle Infrastructure Challenges
In NJIT’s Materials and Structures Laboratory, Noah Thibodeaux is concocting a series of concrete mixtures containing varying levels of old, pulverized roadway. The lab, which is working with the New York City Department of Transportation to determine the feasibility of using recycled aggregate in new projects, is focused on its near-term performance and durability over time, as well as its impact on the environment.
“Durability and sustainability go hand in hand – you can’t have one without the other,” notes Thibodeaux, a Ph.D. student in civil engineering. “It’s important to assess the reusability of building materials to construct sustainable infrastructure in the future.”
Infrastructure engineers face monumental challenges in the 21st century that require simultaneous problem-solving on several fronts: How to quickly assess the structural health of thousands of neglected roads, bridges and tunnels; how to repair and rebuild them, including in emergencies, to last in a dramatically changing world; and how to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint.
The Materials and Structures Laboratory, directed by Matthew Adams and Matthew Bandelt, both assistant professors of civil engineering, uses experimental methods and computer modeling to evaluate the performance of existing and emerging construction materials and structures from the nanometer to the meter scale. A key focus is the behavior of sustainable materials, such as recycled concrete aggregates and resilient and damage-tolerant materials, including high-performance fiber-reinforced concrete. In another regional project, the lab is working with the New Jersey Department of Transportation to identify novel materials that can be rapidly deployed in New Jersey’s reinforced concrete transportation infrastructure to improve its longevity and reduce the long-term costs of construction.
But as urban centers boom and congestion builds, traffic safety, air quality and productivity suffer. Managing this growth, while mitigating its harm, is another challenge taken up by a diverse array of infrastructure specialists. At NJIT, civil, mechanical and electrical engineers, computer scientists, physicists and industrial designers attack the problem from several angles. Among their goals is to create smarter cars and saner streets with technologies that optimize rideshare networks and defuse traffic jams.
It’s important to assess the reusability of building materials to construct sustainable infrastructure in the future.
In a robotics lab spilling over with 3D-printed parts, engineering students have gutted toy versions of trucks, SUVs, sedans and two-door Mini Coopers and refitted them with custom-designed systems: laser-cut side mirrors, wheels that can parallel park and a braking system that employs algorithms to control an electric motor, thus enabling soft and hard braking, idling and taxiing.
The cars tool around Assistant Professor Cong Wang’s Control Automation Robotics Lab, where they are guided by remote drivers at gaming-style steering wheel and pedal control stations; they are then deployed on the streets of a miniaturized Newark, N.J., where they will share the right of way with autonomous cars controlled by computers and remotely operated pedestrians. Three tiny video cameras, facing in different directions, sit in the driver position of each remotely steered car and a lidar scanning range finder spins on the roof to continuously survey the surroundings so drivers can respond to conditions on the road.
The model city, with its signalized intersections, access ramps and mix of roads and highways, is a novel assessment platform designed by Joyoung Lee, an associate professor of civil engineering, to evaluate the impacts of connected and automated vehicles on drivers, passengers in autonomous cars and pedestrians. Through crowdsourced experiments conducted over the internet, test participants will play each of these parts using virtual reality interfaces so that Lee and his collaborators, including Wang, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Guiling “Grace” Wang, an associate professor of computer science, can evaluate their responses.
“This project is highly interdisciplinary; it draws on skills from several different areas, such as transportation engineering, computing, networking and robotics,” notes Cong Wang. “The students are very creative, and willing to try out a lot of different ideas. They don’t all work, but even the failures help us move ahead.”
In a real-world test, NJIT and the City of Newark are collaborating on a project aimed at improving mobility, safety and air quality along congested urban routes. Called the Integrated Connected Urban Corridor (ICUC), the system includes state-of-the-art traffic detection, air pollution sensors and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications along arterial roadways with traffic lights. The goal is to reduce the number of congestion- and emissions-producing stops, vehicle idling and delays at traffic signals.
The system could be used by the city to optimize traffic operation strategies, explains Branislav Dimitrijevic, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and a co-principal investigator on the project, which is funded by the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
Throughout the pandemic, faculty and students have navigated pandemic shutdowns to keep critical infrastructure projects up and running.
NJIT’s Engineers Without Borders chapter, for example, is designing a gravity-powered water distribution system for Maca Grande, Ecuador, a small agricultural community in the Andes that it will hire a local construction company to build. Thinuri Fernando, a junior, is raising funds and applying for grants to pay the contractor.
"We are working to provide the community its most basic need – fresh water," Fernando says.
Yousef Elakbawy, a senior majoring in engineering technology and a member of NJIT’s Concrete Industry Management program - one of only four throughout the country, directed by engineering technology professor Mohamed Mahgoub - is the project manager for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Justice Building, a new, 150,000-square-foot office building for Essex County in Newark. Connected by a pedestrian bridge to the Essex County Hall of Records Complex, the new building will include space for 11 courtrooms for Tax Court, among other county offices.
“We are determined to complete the construction on time – within 15 months,” said Elakbawy, who manages project details, from ordering structural glass and precast concrete panels to managing the budget and construction schedule, to ensuring the worksite remains COVID-19-free. “Half of doing is believing that you can.”
Off-campus, NJIT alumni are building sustainable infrastructure that will reduce the carbon footprint of the infrastructure sector and the economy more generally.
Nicholas DeNichilo ’73, M.S. ’78, president and CEO of engineering firm Mott MacDonald, North America, takes on transportation, water and energy infrastructure projects made vastly more complex by resiliency problems such as climate change and earthquakes. In Los Angeles, for example, his firm is designing and providing project management for a 1.9-mile light rail line that will provide a single-seat ride throughout Los Angeles County, linking the metro area’s 80-station system to Southern California’s regional passenger rail, Metrolink.
