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Segregation determination in the asphalt pavement is an issue causing many disputes between agencies and contractors. The visual inspection method has commonly been used to determine pavement texture and in-place core density test used for verification. Furthermore, laser-based devices, such as the Florida Texture Meter (FTM) and the Circular Track Meter (CTM), have recently been developed to evaluate the asphalt mixture texture. In this study, an innovative digital image processing approach is used to determine pavement segregation. In this procedure, the standard deviation of the grayscale image frequency histogram is used to determine segregated regions. Linear Discriminate Analysis (LDA) is then implemented on the obtained standard deviations from image processing to classify pavements into the segregated and nonsegregated areas. The visual inspection method is utilized to verify this method. The results have demonstrated that this new method is a robust tool to determine segregated areas in newly paved FC9.5 pavement types.

During the past decades, there has been an extensive attention in using Ultra-High Performance Concrete (UHPC) in the buildings and infrastructures construction. Due to that, defining comprehensive mechanical properties of UHPC required to design structural members is worthwhile. The main difference of UHPC with the conventional concrete is the very high strength of UHPC, resulting designing elements with less weight and smaller sizes.  However, there have been no globally accepted UHPC properties to be implemented in the designing process. Therefore, in the current study, the UHPC mechanical properties such as compressive and tensile strength, modulus of elasticity and development length for designing purposes are provided based on the reviewed literature. According to that, the best-recommended properties of UHPC that can be used in designing of UHPC members are summarized. Finally, different topics for future works and researches on UHPC’s mechanical properties are suggested.

In the current paper, the consolidation settlement of a strip footing over a finite layer of saturated soil has been studied using the finite element method. In Biot’s coupled consolidation equations, the soil deformation and excess pore pressure are determined simultaneously in every time step which refers to the hydro-mechanical coupling. By considering a constant total stress throughout the time and by assuming that volume strain is a function of isotropic effective stress, uncoupled consolidation equations can be obtained using coupled consolidation equations. In these uncoupled equations, excess pore pressure and deformation are determined separately. In this approach, the excess pore pressure can be identified in the first stage. Using the calculated excess pore pressure, the soil deformation is determined through effective stress-strain analyses. A computer code was developed based on coupled and uncoupled equations that are capable of performing consolidation analyses. To verify the accuracy of these analyses, the obtained results have been compared with the precise solution of Terzaghi’s one-dimensional consolidation theory. The capability of these two approaches in estimation of pore water pressure and settlement and to show Mandel-Crayer’s effect in soil consolidation is discussed. Then, the necessity of utilizing coupled analyses for evaluating soil consolidation analysis was investigated by comparing the coupled and uncoupled analyses results.