The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the status quo of the telemobility landscape in the United States, forcing millions of Americans into lock down, significantly changing the way we work, travel, and spend our time and money for an extended period of time. After several months of adaptation, adoption, learning, and unlearning,...
Slow-moving landslides are common in mountainous area worldwide. Most of them mobilizes slowly over long periods of time, which causes continuous damage to proximal infrastructure and habitats. Most notably, some slow-moving landslides can experience catastrophic acceleration at some point in their life cycle, with potentially fatal consequences. It is therefore...
Granular materials consisting of discrete particles, are a pervasive material in nature and play a major role in disparate fields of science and technology. To control and manipulate the granular materials in engineering, enriching our understanding of their fundamental characteristics and mechanical behavior is crucial. In this context, one of...
Over 10 billion tons of concrete are produced for the construction industry every year, making concrete the second most used substance on Earth, only surpassed by water. With such high importance as a building material, there is significant need for the ability to accurately model concrete behavior. As a quasi-brittle...
This thesis describes an exploratory project to develop a highly non-traditional approach to devise novel test methods for characterizing the properties of materials that are essential to the design of sustainable and resilient infrastructure, particularly naturally occurring materials such as soils and rocks. The central idea is that the material...
Urban Air Taxi (UAT) is the use case of passenger-carrying Urban Air Mobility (UAM) at its mature state, and it offers a ubiquitous on-demand (or nearly on-demand) per-seat service that moves passengers in urban or suburban areas using groundbreaking aircraft. However, the absence of a dominant electric vertical take-off and...
Travel time is a key aspect of capturing and evaluating the operational performance and service quality of transportation systems, and travel time improvement is a common objective for travelers, service providers, transportation practitioners and agencies. However, the reliability of travel times, including the probability of unexpected delays, is an important...
In this dissertation, advances are made in understanding both the way hyporheic exchange impacts riverbed morphodynamics and the physical processes that lead to turbulent momentum transfer in the first few grains of riverbed sediments. In terms of physical advances in understanding the interplay between bedform movement and hyporheic exchange, we...
Soil-Machine Interaction (SMI) is ubiquitous on Earth and other planets. Over decades, ground-engaging equipment has been developed and widely used in various engineering applications, including civil construction, agriculture, terrestrial mobility, and even space exploration. However, systematic studies of SMI processes and the corresponding soil behavior are inadequate, which obstructs further...
Providing quality transit service to travelers is a constant challenge for transit agencies. The advent of fully-autonomous vehicles (AVs) and their inclusion in mobility service fleets may allow transit agencies to offer better service or reduce their own capital and operational costs. This study focuses on the problem of allocating...
