Road Bed as Test Bed

Pitt, Pa. Turnpike Team Up to Make Mon-Fayette Expressway a Test Bed for Innovative Construction

When construction begins next year on the Mon-Fayette Expressway between Jefferson Hills and Duquesne, the new roadway will provide more than a new travel connection for residents of the Monongahela Valley.

The new toll road also will serve as a test bed for innovative transportation construction techniques that could use noise reduction walls to reduce pollution and produce electricity from traffic-generated road vibrations for road signs, among other things.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike, which is building the toll road first discussed in the 1960s, approved a $2.7 million agreement with the University of Pittsburgh for a series of pilot projects during highway construction. Turnpike engineers have been working since 2021 with the Impactful Resilient Infrastructure Science and Engineering consortium based at the Swanson School on Engineering to select the projects.

“We were looking for something that’s actually doable and not some pie-in-the-sky kind of thing,” said Julie Marie Vandenbossche, professor of civil engineering and former head of the consortium. “This is the largest thing we’ve done through IRISE.”

The turnpike has been part of IRISE since it formed in 2016 as a collaboration between the engineering school, construction firms and government transportation agencies, said Ed Skorpinski, an engineer project manager for the turnpike. After watching the group work on smaller projects such as how to reduce and respond to landslides, the agency decided to use the group to design and test innovations.

“We thought [building the expressway] could be a unique test bed,” Skorpinski said.

The plan is to test ideas – many of which haven’t been tried before – during construction of the expressway and decide whether they produce positive results for a reasonable price. If so, they can be included in future projects, Skorpinski said.

The turnpike advertised for bids for the first section of the toll road before the end of 2022, while the test specifications are still being developed, so pilots likely will be included in later segments of the project. The southern leg of the highway, which will be built sequentially from Jefferson Hills north with more than a half dozen construction contracts, is expected to be finished by 2028.

The four pilot projects will be:

• Redesigning noise walls using a hollow, honeycomb-like material to reduce sound and treating it with a catalyst that will capture nitrogen oxides generated by vehicles with combustion engines. The process will convert the pollutants into harmless nitrates that will dissipate naturally, similar to a car’s catalytic converter.

Sound barriers will be included toward the northern end of construction, so their exact locations haven’t been determined yet.

Skorpinski said the pilot will determine how effective the system is at reducing pollution.

“It could have a good benefit in the future,” he said.

• Using the natural vibrations that vehicles cause on road surfaces to generate electricity for road signs. Researchers will test whether the sensors to capture vibrations work better with asphalt or concrete surfaces before they choose a location to try the system, which also would use recycled plastic.

The pilot will test the concept in small sections but if it works it could be used on longer stretches of the highway, Skorpinski said.

• Creating a digital, three-dimensional model of a one-mile section of the highway as it is being built. The model will be used to simulate and monitor the wear and tear on the road over the years.

“It will definitely help to alert us to when problems are developing,” Skorpinski said. “It won’t slow down what is happening. It will help to let us know when we should be paying attention.”

• Testing which method works best for recharging electric vehicles as they drive over the road surface. The process involves putting charging elements just under the surface that are activated when electric vehicles drive over them and recharge their batteries as they drive.

This trial likely would be part of the construction of the northern section of the highway, from Duquesne to Monroeville, which isn’t expected to begin until 2030 or later. The turnpike already is working with the Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification program at Utah State and the Ohio Turnpike to develop a demonstration project on roadway electrification at the Pennsylvania-Ohio border over the next five years.

IRISE Director Joe Szczur called turnpike test projects “the basis of where the IRISE consortium is heading.”

“This is a good example of the kind of things we can do,” he said. “These are the things [road designers] need. That’s the reason IRISE was created.”

Or as Vandenbossche put it, “This is when research becomes fun.”

Skorpinski said trials are important for the turnpike, which manages more than 500 miles of roads across the state.

“This is stuff that hasn’t really been done in this region,” he said. “Hey, if we find out this is something that works, we would absolutely look to incorporate it throughout our system.”

Model Research

Alessandro Fascetti didn’t know his career as assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering would lead to him to become a certified industrial drone pilot, but that has become a regular part of his job.

Fascetti, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, is part of a team preparing a digital model and history of the construction of the new Fern Hollow Bridge. The project involves piloting a hexacopter drone for 11½ minutes every two weeks to record photo and laser images of the progress of construction, about 170 million pieces of information each week.

The project received a $141,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to create the digital model, believed to be the first of its kind

Going with the Flow

Imagine a school of fish swimming through the open water. The way the water flows affects how the school of fish moves and how much energy the fish expend; however, their movement affects the way the water flows, too.

The interactions at play here are part of the field of fluid dynamics, which is critical to engineering in the country. Fascetti’s team is following the emergency replacement of the bridge after the previous structure collapsed in January 2022. solutions to direct wastewater, or to map and contain oceanic oil spills. Lei Fang, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, received $361,476 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to model the effect of active matter on transport barriers that partition the flow domain into disconnected regions.

Copyright Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 2022, reprinted with permission.

“Even though transport barriers are effective in understanding and controlling the transport of inactive material, that’s not the case for active matter,” explained Fang, who leads the Fang Research Group in the Swanson School of Engineering. “There is a critical need for a framework to model the interactions between active matter and transport barriers in the flow so that we can better understand the effect of overfishing on ocean currents, for example, or further develop drone technologies that can operate in swarms for environmental and urban monitoring.”

In order to build this framework, Fang will start on a smaller scale – much smaller.

Using a quasi-two-dimensional laboratory flow system, Fang will examine the effect of a group of brine shrimp – tiny zooplankton measuring less than a half-inch long – on transport barriers. He will use a light-guiding system to guide the brine shrimp through the system: a thin device filled with shallow water that produces chaotic and turbulent flows.