Underground Construction - September 2021 - 23

Trenchless Technology Center Report
TTC Thrives Through the Pandemic
Dr. John Matthews | Trenchless Technology Center Director
Th e Trenchless Technology Center (TTC) at
Louisiana Tech University has once again
had an active year of research, training and
growth. Its Industry Advisory Board (IAB)
continued to meet its mission to advance
trenchless technology by serving as an
independent source of knowledge, research
and education in the industry.
While not immune to the impacts of
the global pandemic that has aff ected all
aspects of our daily lives, TTC is operating
at full force now, after several months of
remote and shifted work. Th e TTC pivoted
to provide training online this past year and
will continue to do so until municipalities
are ready to return to in-person training.
In 2021, TTC has again maintained its
role as a leader in trenchless education
and research and is continuing to grow its
impact in the areas of industry workforce
development and training. TTC reached
new heights in the overall number of IAB
members, even as we entered our 32nd
year of existence. Th is tells us that there is
importance in our mission that is valuable
to the trenchless technology manufacturers,
contractors, engineers and owners we serve.
Research, development
Th is year, TTC's research contracts
continued to be very active and diverse,
with a number of industry and governmental
projects taking place, while even
more proposals were submitted to a wide
range of funding agencies. As it has been
historically, the majority of TTC research
is funded by industry clients and associations,
some of whom require various types
of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Th is
has always limited the amount of research
TTC is able to publish.
Despite this fact, in 2020-2021, TTC
researchers actually outperformed the previous
banner year of 2019-2020 in terms
of the number of peer-reviewed publications
produced. As a center, the members
produced a record 16 peer-reviewed journal
papers in 2018 and exceeded that amount
with 19 in 2019 and again with 27 in 2021.
Th is is an important metric for many
research centers and associated faculty
members and researchers.
Currently, TTC has more than 10 active
research projects underway, and approximately
four that were completed during
this past year. A few brief research eff ort
updates are noted below.
TTC continues to be a thought leader in
non-destructive testing (NDT) and its application
in a number of areas, led by Dr. Arun
Jaganathan, associate professor of civil
engineering. For years, this work has been
applied to solve problems related to in-pipe
inspection, through wall defect detection,
and obstacle detection and avoidance. Most
of the work is carried out completely inhouse,
from theoretical modeling to design,
and prototyping of the solution.
In fact, most of the modeling is written
in unique code, not with commercially
available software programs. Th is is an
extremely unique capability, even for a
university research center, that TTC is able
to share with its partners to help solve
complex problems. Most work in this area
cannot be published due to NDAs and IP
protections, but TTC was recently awarded
a three-year grant from the National
Science Foundation focused on surface
wave analysis of RCPs.
Th e CIPP emissions study for NASSCO,
which was completed by a team led by Dr.
Elizabeth Matthews, assistant professor of
civil engineering, has now moved to Phase
3. Th is new project is specifi cally focused
on the emissions of CIPP liners in their
uncured state inside of a storage unit or
transport truck. Th is study will determine
the breakthrough times of emissions by
varying the coating materials and thicknesses
on the uncured CIPP liners. Th e Phase
3 study is being led by Dr. Shaurav Alam,
TTC associate director for research. Once
a relationship is established for various
coatings, fi eld validations will be completed
with actual transport trucks containing
actual liners being transported to job sites.
Th is study is being supported by NASSCO.
TTC continued its internally funded
work in the area of innovative materials led
by Dr. Alam. Th is team has been investigating
numerous thrusts including innovative
cementitious materials for infrastructure
components and coatings, as well as
innovative curing of both construction
materials and pipe lining materials. Th e
fi ndings are quite fascinating and have
potentially widespread impacts for the
construction industry. TTC Researcher Dr.
Sudhir Amritphale has also been exploring
various applications for innovative
cementitious and geopolymer materials
with exciting new benefi ts.
Work also continued with various
trenchless rehabilitation technology suppliers
to further develop testing methods
and protocols for innovative materials and
designs. To that end, TTC maintained is
recently obtained lab accreditation to ISO/
IEC Standard 17025:2017 for another year.
Th is achievement took a team eff ort
and was not a straightforward process,
considering that TTC conducts many
non-standardized tests, because many of
the materials/methods in the trenchless
industry are on the cutting edge of what has
been done before. Th erefore, standard tests
do not yet exist. Despite this fact, TTC was
able to meet ISO 17-025 standards and has
the ability to add more tests to its accreditation
in the future, if needed. Special thanks
to core team members Chris Morgan (lab
manager), Dr. Alam and Dr. Amin Azimi for
their support with this eff ort.
One fi nal research note is that the highly
competitive NSF Industry/University
Collaborative Research Center (I/UCRC)
Planning grant that was awarded to
researchers at TTC and its partners at LSU
came to end and the team was awarded
a Phase 1 I/UCRC grant. Th e I/UCRC
program is a unique off ering from NSF
UCONonline.com | SEPTEMBER 2021
23
http://www.UCONonline.com
Underground Construction - September 2021

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