Civil Engineering

Climatic responsive buildings are examples of a sensitive approach to energy consciousness for indoor comfort conditions. It has now become essential to develop energy efficient building design. The basis requirement of a building is to provide thermal comfort to its occupants. In modern buildings this is usually accomplished with the help of mechanical cooling or heating. With the advent of energy crisis there has been a need to develop climatic design tools which will provide thermal comfort in a building without or with minimum expenditure of energy. Climate determines the amount of solar radiation and mean outside temperature that a building is exposed to. Buildings are experiencing overheating during summer. For a built form, vertical surfaces are the most critical to the impact of solar radiation. This study examines the effect of different plan forms on the total solar radiation received by vertical surfaces of the buildings. The aim of this paper is to analyse the climatic conditions with respect to thermal comfort in buildings for the location of Bhubaneswar. The impact of building location and orientation on thermal comfort has been investigated. Different building shapes (square and rectangular) have been studied with variations in width-to-length ratio (aspect ratio) and building orientation. This study guides designers on choosing optimum form and appropriate orientation for buildings. The present paper describes how different plan forms are affected by solar radiation. Based on that the optimum aspect ratio (Length: Width) of the building over the location of Bhubaneswar has been found out which will receive minimum radiation in summer and maximum radiation in winter. This result in significant saving in the energy consumed while creating comfortable indoor environment.

Extreme flood events in river Jhelum are a major disaster in the State of Jammu & Kashmir, India. In the present study HEC-RAS model was applied to two different reaches of river Jhelum located upstream and downstream of the historic city of Srinagar. The vulnerability of important areas and structures corresponding to 25, 50 & 100 year return period flood events was determined. The levels of the bunds of river Jhelum were found to be inadequate at many places for 100 year return period flood. The flood spill channel constructed for safeguarding Srinagar city was found to be ineffective for conveying optimized flow.

The investigation focuses on the effectiveness of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) confinement in upgrading ductility and strength of concrete columns under axial compression. An experimental program is carried out to investigate the influence of the radius of the cross sectional corners on the strength of small scale square column specimens confined with FRP composite laminates. This study was achieved by testing 63 specimens depending on the selected corner radius, the section varied from square to circular. The various parameters such as corner radius, wrap thickness and fiber orientation of 0°, 90°, +45°,-45° and combinations of them were investigated. Smoothening of the edges of square cross-section plays a significant role in delaying the failure of FRP composite at these edges and the efficiency of FRP confinement is directly related to the radius of the cross-section edges.

Currently the residential sector in India is growing more than 26% per annum. However the efficiency of construction sector in India is very low when compared to other countries. In order to assess the current situation of planning techniques used in residential project of India, a survey is carried out in the region of Pune city. The survey indicates that there is a vast difference in the planning techniques used by construction firms depending on their sizes. The small and medium size construction firms are reluctant in using the planning tools and the focus on planning in such companies is less.

The state of art of support vector mechanics method (SVM) problems related to civil engineering is presented in this paper till now. Areas of further research are presented and ongoing numerical investigations on SVM techniques are shown.

The objective of this research is to assess the adequacy of probability distribution for development of Rainfall IDF relationship at South-Eastern region of Bangladesh. Two common frequency analysis techniques Gumbel and Log Pearson Type III (LPTIII) distribution were used to develop the IDF relationship from rainfall data of this region. Yearly extreme rainfall data for last 41 years (1974-2014) from Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) was used in this study. Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) empirical reduction formula was used to estimate the short duration rainfall intensity from yearly maximum rainfall data. The effects obtained using Gumbel method are slightly higher than LPT III distribution method. The chi-square goodness of fit test was used to determine the best fit probability distribution. The parameters of the IDF equations and coefficient of correlation for different return periods (2, 5, 10, 25, 50 and 100 years) were calculated by using nonlinear regression method. The results obtained offered that in all the cases the correlation coefficient is very high representing the goodness of fit of the formulae to estimate IDF curves in the region of interest. It was found that intensity of rainfall decreases with increase in rainfall duration. Further, a rainfall of any given duration will have a larger intensity if its return period is large. In other words, for a rainfall of given duration, rainfalls of higher intensity in that duration are rarer than rainfalls of smaller intensity.

HPC mixes may be made with Silica fume for cement and binary and ternary mixes involving Industrial By-products of Bottom ash and steel slag aggregate for the replacement of Fine aggregate and Coarse aggregate. Binary mixes involved combinations of silica fume and bottom ash, silica fume and steel slag aggregate, bottom ash and steel slag aggregate and ternary mixes involved combination both of three materials in concrete consumes CH leads to development of a different morphology in ITZ. This paper presents SEM for the three phases and an evaluation of the ITZ in the three cases for making HPC.

Research and investigation was carried out on “Assessing the impacts of climate change on Surface Water Resources of Dal Catchment”. Two catchments of Dal Lake viz. Dachigam and Telbal were selected for the study purpose; since the two alone contribute about 80% to the waters of Dal Lake. The stream discharges and climatic data were obtained for the previous 20 years. The three main variables of study were discharge, temperature and precipitation; discharge being the response variable with respect to the remaining two. Trend lines were established for each of the variables with the help of the 5 year moving averages; which revealed the increasing trend in the temperature and the stream discharge, while a decreasing trend was visible in the precipitation. The trend of the three parameters was in accordance with the global climatic and hydrological findings. Further, to analyze the findings, Mann-Kendal’s test was used to ascertain the results. As per this test, discharge displays a significant trend over the given period of study at 5% significance levels with a p-value of 0.006; temperature also indicates a significant trend at 10% significance level with a p-value of 0.086 while the precipitation could not reveal any significant trend over the limited time frame of study even at 10% significance level, which could be a result of the seasonal dimension to it. The given study concluded that there was an adverse effect of the climate change on the catchment of the Dal Lake.

Watershed prioritization has gained importance in natural resources management, especially in the context of watershed management. The prioritization process identifies the highest priority watershed(s) or erosion susceptibility zone in which to conduct management. Morphometric analysis has been applied to prioritization of micro-watersheds as watershed characteristics of a basin represent its physical and morphological attributes that are employed in synthesizing its hydrological response. The present study makes an attempt to prioritize thirty two micro-watersheds of Dal lake Catchment of Srinagar district, Jammu and Kashmir based on morphometric parameters using GIS techniques. Various morphometric parameters, namely linear parameters and shape parameters have been determined using Survey of India (SOI) toposheets at 1:50,000 scale for each micro-watershed and assigned ranks on the basis of value/relationship so as to arrive at a computed value for a final ranking of the micro-watersheds. The analysis has revealed that the total number as well as total length of stream segments is maximum in first order streams and decreases as the stream order increases. Horton’s law of stream numbers and stream lengths is also found to be in conformity with the catchment.

This paper presents the rehabilitation of a bridge (Zero bridge) which is constructed of old traditional construction material i.e. Wood (Timber). It includes the design considerations of substructure and superstructure of the bridge, Need for rehabilitation of bridge, difference between old and new design of bridge. Apart from the modern construction materials which are well documented in the codes of practice, Wood is an old traditional construction material which has proved to be durable, easy constructable , and effective for resisting earthquake loading as well.