Keywords

air, air quality modeling, CAL3QHC, CALINE, Graphical user interface for CAL3QHC, AutoCAD, Programming

Abstract

One of the major sources of air pollution in the United States metropolitan areas is due to automobiles. With the huge growth of motor vehicles and, greater dependence on them, air pollution problems have been aggravated. According to the EPA, nearly 95% of carbon monoxide (CO ) (EPA 1999) in urban areas comes from mobile sources, of which 51% is contributed by on road vehicles. It is well known fact that, carbon monoxide is one of the major mobile source pollutants and CO has detrimental effects on the human health. Carbon monoxide is the result of mainly incomplete combustion of gasoline in motor vehicles (FDOT 1996). The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) gives important considerations to the actions to be taken. Transportation conformity . The Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA, 1970) was an important step in meeting the National Ambient Air Quality Standards In order to evaluate the effects of CO and Particulate Matter (PM) impacts based on the criteria for NAAQS standards, it is necessary to conduct dispersion modeling of emissions for mobile source emissions. Design of transportation engineering systems (roadway design) should take care of both the flow of the traffic as well as the air pollution aspects involved. Roadway projects need to conform to the State Implementation Plan (SIP) and meet the NAAQS. EPA guidelines for air quality modeling on such roadway intersections recommend the use of CAL3QHC. The model has embedded in it CALINE 3.0 (Benson 1979) – a line source dispersion model based on the Gaussian equation. The model requires parameters with respect to the roadway geometry, fleet volume, averaging time, surface roughness, emission factors, etc. The CAL3QHC model is a DOS based model which requires the modeling parameters to be fed into an input file. The creation of input the file is a tedious job. Previous work at UCF, resulted in the development of CALQVIEW, which expedites this process of creating input files, but the task of extracting the coordinates still has to be done manually. The main aim of the thesis is to reduce the analysis time for modeling emissions from roadway intersections, by expediting the process of extracting the coordinates required for the CAL3QHC model. Normally, transportation engineers design and model intersections for the traffic flow utilizing tools such as AutoCAD, Microstation etc. This thesis was to develop advanced software allowing graphical editing and coordinates capturing from an AutoCAD file. This software was named as CALQCAD. This advanced version will enable the air quality analyst to capture the coordinates from an AutoCAD 2004 file. This should expedite the process of modeling intersections and decrease analyst time from a few days to few hours. The model helps to assure the air quality analyst to retain accuracy during the modeling process. The idea to create the standalone interface was to give the AutoCAD user full functionality of AutoCAD tools in case editing is required to the main drawing. It also provides the modeler with a separate graphical user interface (GUI).

Notes

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Graduation Date

2005

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Cooper, C. David

Degree

Master of Science in Environmental Engineering (M.S.Env.E.)

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Degree Program

Environmental Engineering

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0000483

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0000483

Language

English

Release Date

May 2005

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

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