Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management
A collection of scholarly work published by and supporting the Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management (CESEM) at Arizona State University.
CESEM focuses on "earth systems engineering and management," providing a basis for understanding, designing, and managing the complex integrated built/human/natural systems that increasingly characterize our planet.
Works in this collection are particularly important in linking engineering, technology, and sustainability, and are increasingly intertwined with the work of ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS).
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Infrastructure (Economics)
- All Subjects: Structural analysis (Engineering)
The current study conducts a comparative LCA of two alternative structural retrofit/ strengthening techniques - steel jacketing, and the carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) retrofit. A cradle-to-gate system boundary is used for both techniques. The results indicated that the CFRP retrofit technique has merits over the conventional steel jacketing in all three impact categories covered by this study. This is primarily attribute to the much less material consumption for CFRP retrofit as compared to steel jacketing for achieving the same load carrying capability of the retrofitted bridge structures. Even though the transoceanic transportation of carbon fiber has been taken into account in this study, the energy consumption and environmental impacts of CFRP transportation is still much smaller than steel due to it light weight property. The impacts of CFRP retrofit are mainly focused in the material manufacturing phase, which implies that the improvements in the carbon fiber manufacturing technology could potentially further reduce the environmental impacts of CFRP retrofit.
As technologies rapidly progress, there is growing evidence that our civil infrastructure do not have the capacity to adaptively and reliably deliver services in the face of rapid changes in demand, conditions of service, and environmental conditions. Infrastructure are facing multiple challenges including inflexible physical assets, unstable and insufficient funding, maturation, utilization, increasing interdependencies, climate change, social and environmental awareness, changes in coupled technology systems, lack of transdisciplinary expertise, geopolitical security, and wicked complexity. These challenges are interrelated and several produce non-stationary effects. Successful infrastructure in the twenty-first century will need to be flexible and agile. Drawing from other industries, we provide recommendations for competencies to realize flexibility and agility: roadmapping, focus on software over hardware, resilience-based thinking, compatibility, connectivity, and modularity of components, organic and change-oriented management, and transdisciplinary education. First, we will need to understand how non-technical and technical forces interact to lock in infrastructure, and create path dependencies.
This report has been advanced to a peer-reviewed journal publication:
Mikhail Chester and Braden Allenby, 2008, Toward adaptive infrastructure: flexibility and agility in a non-stationarity age, Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, pp. 1-19, DOI: 10.1080/23789689.2017.1416846.