Urban highways users frequently face disruptions due to construction and maintenance of buried infrastructure. In conventional open cut construction, social costs (vehicle operating and traffic delay costs) are generally high at work zone construction areas (WZCA). Municipalities also bear additional costs due to early maintenance of alternate routes, i.e., non-work zone construction area (NWZCA). Besides, work zone and non-work zone areas together experience significant potential socio-economic and environment impacts. In addition to minimal disturbance to existing socioenvironmental setting and user cost savings, trenchless construction result in agency cost savings by avoiding early maintenance at NWZCA. Past studies primarily focused on social costs associated to WZCA. In present research, a sustainability assessment framework has been developed that includes agency and user costs at both the work zone and non-work zone area. The framework evaluates various traffic detoured scenarios (for open cut construction) and trenchless technology scenario based on all three dimensions of sustainability. Fuzzy Quality Function Deployment (Fuzzy QFD) method has been used to incorporate the interaction between the agency’s sustainability objectives and public expectations for large-sized pipeline construction projects in urban areas. The framework effectively handles the uncertainties associated to data limitations and vagueness in expert opinion for subjective assessment criteria. To evaluate the pragmatism of proposed framework, it was applied on the case of a storm sewer construction project in Qassim Region, Saudi Arabia. Trenchless technology was found to be the most sustainable construction scenario followed by the open cut scenario with 50% traffic detoured to NWCA. The proposed methodology is also sought to enhance decision making process pertaining to the viability of trenchless technologies in KSA and elsewhere.

With the continuous developments of civil engineering practices in general and structural engineering in particular, engineers have been investigating the rehabilitation/strengthening techniques of existing structures to save them and/or increase their load capacity by raising the efficiency of the structural elements of existing buildings such as beams and columns. This technique used for different purposes such as in increasing the lifetime of these structures, adapting with the change of functionality of the building, and to overcome the error design. The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of changing some properties of reinforced concrete jacket u-shaped which used for strengthening reinforced concrete (RC) beams. This study focused on increasing the load capacity of beams in existing buildings. The effect of changing yield strength, concrete strength, rebar size, and thickness of RC jackets on the load capacity of beams have been investigated aiming at identifying the best practices in this regard using Finite Element Method (FEM)-based numerical analysis utilizing ANSYS software. Moreover, reinforcement stress is discussed. The results of the numerical analysis have verified experimentally utilizing previous research. It is noticed that some of the proposed changes for RC jackets contribute in improving of performance for U-concrete jacketing technique to be a more effective technique to strengthen the existing beams which shall help engineers in practical use in the field. The thickness of the RC jacket has been changed to 10 cm rather than 2.5 cm with the same characteristic in Case.g. Boundary Condition and Applied LoadCharacteristics of the boundary condition and applied load can be summarized in the following points and in (Fig. 2): 1. The beam self-weight was taken into consideration in this numerical modeling.

Background: Electrical resistivity tests at a project site could be a valuable economical alternative to typical geotechnical soil exploration and a reliable source of data. In the present study, the soil at a constructed underground water tank site in Qassim Region – Saudi Arabia is investigated using the electrical resistivity testing method. Objective: The study aims to compare the results of traditional soil boreholes that were conducted at various stages of the project lifetime with the interpretation of soil resistivity test results. Methods: Eight soil boreholes were drilled at the water tank site to capture the nature of soil layers. The electrical resistivity of soil layers at the site is measured and used to investigate the ground subsurface of the project site. The geophysical software, ZondRes2d is utilized to analyze and interpret the collected data. Results: Both geotechnical soil boreholes and geophysical electrical resistivity tests revealed similar soil profiles with three main layers comprising of backfill material, clay with expansive nature, and weathered limestone and marl. The results of the electrical resistivity tests are also affirmative of available resistance values of different soils in the literature. Conclusion: The study shows that electrical resistivity testing is reliable in capturing the soil nature which presents an attractive tool for preliminary investigation of the soil-related problems of distressed structures.