Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) are paid, hands-on research positions that give students the opportunity to actively participate in research and work closely with faculty. There are 14 REU projects underway this semester, providing students the opportunity to work closely with professors on topics ranging from large excavations in urban environments to the impact of climate change on Lake Michigan shoreline rocks. Here, some of the students provide summaries of the work they are doing:
Abby Hutter
Year: Senior, graduating this December
Area of Concentration: primary in Construction Management and a secondary in Geotechnical Engineering
Project title: Future underground landscape – Learning from large excavations in a complex urban environment
Faculty advisor: Youssef Hashash
"My research with Professor Hashash has involved studying excavation performance from the extensive field monitoring data of the Los Angeles Metro expansion. Induced ground response to braced excavations and Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) operation is evaluated by our research group using the instrumentation data collected during construction. The outcome of this research is improved empirical models for estimating induced ground displacements in support of the design of future underground space development."
Lydia Aigbokhai
Year: Senior
Area of Concentration: Civil Engineering: Transportation and Construction Management
Project title: GPR-based near real-time monitoring of asphalt concrete density
Faculty advisor: Imad Al-Qadi
"I am working with ground penetrating radar (GPR), which can accurately predict density in asphalt concrete (AC). GPR works by sending a tiny pulse of energy into a material and then recording the strength and the time required for the return of a reflected signal. I am currently working alongside Lama Abufares, a graduate student, to develop a user-friendly tool suite to manage near-real-time density monitoring during the AC pavement compaction process."
Zeyu Li
Year: Junior
Area of Concentration: Structural Engineering
Project title: Hands-on exploration of Direct Ink Writing 3D printing
Faculty advisor: Shelly Zhang
"We are working on direct ink writing techniques, the most versatile 3D printing technique to manufacture intricate designs with a broad range of materials. We explore different materials needed from other literature and conduct experiments for our purposes."
Mackenzie Kimble
Year: Junior
Area of Concentration: Structural Engineering
Project title: Annotating images of water droplets placed on surfaces of varying hydrophobicity
Faculty advisor: Nishant Garg
"The work I do for Professor Garg consists of me annotating images of water droplets in PowerPoint. The images consist of one to six droplets on different types of surfaces that are either hydrophobic or hydrophilic. My job is to trace the outlines of the droplets and then the images are used to train AI."
Arannya Roy
Year: Sophomore
Area of Concentration: While I do not have an area of concentration officially declared, I am set on choosing Environmental Engineering as my primary.
Project title: Characterization of an experimental stream table for ecomorphodynamics research
Faculty advisor: Rafael Tinoco
"Currently, I am working on characterizing the ecomorphodynamic properties of the Emriver EM4 stream table. Most of the work is focused on characterizing the waves produced by the wavemaker that comes with the table - by varying the input settings of the table such as paddle speed, paddle angle, water depth, and time delay, I am trying to test achievable ranges of wave heights, orbital velocities, and frequencies of the waves produced. I am trying to produce models that allow one to know which input parameters to use to create a wave with a certain amplitude, frequency, and/or orbital velocity. The overarching goal is to examine the extent to which the models show that waves and currents produced in this stream table model natural waves and currents in water bodies in real life."
Coleman Froehlke
Year: Junior
Area of Concentration: primary in Geotechnical, secondary in Water Resources
Project title: Characterizing baseline soil (sand, sand-silt, sand-silt-clay mixture) behavior with select polymer additivies
Faculty advisor: Scott Olson
"The topic of the research I am doing with Professor Olson is on testing how certain polymers affect the behavior of a soil. The work I do for Olson is discovering the index properties of soil samples before polymers are added to the samples. Not every sample is going to behave how we are expecting it to behave. We preform qualitative tests on a small portion of the sample before we preform actual lab tests. This saves us time in the long run because we aren’t curating large lab experiments for samples that don’t have the correct behavior. The qualitative tests include testing its strength on a 2 cm cube and testing the samples behavior when exposed to water. The samples that pass the qualitative tests will then be considered for the full lab tests to determine the behavior of the soils."
Yuhui Zhai
Year: Senior
Area of Concentration: primary in Transportation Engineering; CS minor
Project title: Developing a general agent-based simulation platform for shared mobility systems
Faculty advisor: Yanfeng Ouyang
"In this project, I am working with a Ph.D. student to conduct research on planning and operating shared mobility systems. In particular, an agent-based simulation platform is developed to estimate passenger service quality under a variety of service options and operating strategies. In this REU project, I'm learning to build theoretical models to predict the system performance coordinated with the simulation and use these tools to improve mobility services."
Rachel Chen
Year: Sophomore
Area of Concentration: Structural Engineering
Project title: Experimental investigation of Fused Deposition Modeling induced material anisotropy and bonding interfaces for ABS plastic
Faculty advisor: Shelly Zhang
"My work with Professor Zhang consists of conducting research on the anisotropic properties of Fused Deposition Modeling 3D printed ABS plastic. This entails testing the effects of print parameters and intersection geometry on material properties and intersection behavior on ASTM D638 Type I and IV specimens. The specimens undergo tensile and compression tests to determine the ideal print parameters that can be translated to structural members under certain loading conditions."
Haitian Liu
Year: Junior
Area of Concentration: Physical and Hardened Property Changes of Soils, Transportation Engineering/Intelligent Transportation
Project title: Physical and Hardened Property Changes of Soils Stabilized with MSWIA
Faculty advisor: Jeff Roesler
"Description of my work: some mixing and correlations to determine a compaction method for the smaller size molds that will give us the same compaction as the big size mold; mix some clays, ash and lime specimens and make mortar cubes."
Nora Harrington
Year: Senior
Area of Concentration: Structural Engineering
Project title: Impact of climate change on Lake Michigan shoreline rocks
Faculty advisor: Roman Makhnenko
"I am researching the impact that climate change has on the shoreline and bluffs of Lake Michigan. We are looking at the shorelines of Illinois and Wisconsin, specifically in areas where erosion is occurring rapidly. Currently I am performing literature review on various sources in order analyze sources of erosion in Lake Michigan, climate change's impact on erosion in Lake Michigan and areas where erosion is currently occurring. I will be then compiling this research into a final report."
Hubert Zheng
Year: Senior
Area of Concentration: Environmental Engineering
Project title: Moringa functionalized cottong filters for enteric viruses in groundwater
Faculty advisor: Helen Nguyen
"My research interest is developing new sustainable water and wastewater treatment technologies with higher efficiency and longer lifetime that could solve the water crises that our world is currently facing. With this goal, I am currently working with Professor Helen Nguyen to investigate Moringa functionalized cotton filters' ability to remove enteric viruses in our water source. If we approve this simple, low-cost method can efficiently remove enteric viruses such as norovirus, it can potentially be widely applied to underserved regions to relieve their burden of diseases and save millions of lives."
Additional Projects:
- Sophia Shi is working on numerical investigation of defect formation in metal additive manufacturing with faculty advisor Jinhui Yan.
- Noah Burfield is exploring the effect of paste viscosity on Roller Compacted Concrete compaction, with Jeff Roesler.
- Thomas Stogin is working with faculty advisor Eleftheria Kontou on a project titled, Electric Vehicles-Building Nexus: Charging Management for Energy Efficiency Gains and Resilience.