Duane Davis

University of Alaska Fairbanks
Duckering Building

For 2009 Student of the Year AUTC honors Duane Davis, a nontraditional student who joined UAF after 20 years in the workforce.

Davis’ early career took him to remote locations all over Alaska, including oil fields on the North Slope, where he took part in many infrastructure construction projects, as well as working in field investigation and laboratory testing.

In 2004, he decided to pursue degrees in both Mechanical and Civil Engineering. Three-and-a-half years later, he completed a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and began work on a Master of Science in Civil Engineering.

During his undergraduate studies, he joined Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society. Currently he maintains a 3.83 grade point average, and he hopes to graduate by Fall of 2009.

The prospect of merging fundamental concepts from both Mechanical and Civil Engineering to understand changes in material performance behavior in the Arctic, and using that understanding to provide useful solutions to Arctic engineering problems, interests and excites Davis. He believes that Alaska sorely needs infrastructure development, but that the state is limited by the economic costs of improving existing marginal conditions through traditional engineering solutions. New technology and new methods must replace traditional solutions that are inadequate or too costly.

Laboratory research he performed as an undergraduate student studied strength improvements for marginal soils (such as silty-sand) through the combined use of geofibers and a synthetic fluid additive. His current research examines how seasonal frost depth affects laterally loaded deep foundations.

Will Rhodes

University of Alaska Fairbanks
Duckering Building

Email: fswjr@uaf.edu
See attached Resume

The 2008 winner of the Alaska University Transportation Center Student of the Year Award is Will Rhodes, a University of Alaska Fairbanks Master’s candidate in Environmental Engineering. Rhodes earned his Bachelor of Science degree at UAF in Geology in 2005.

Rhodes’ research has centered on “Herbicide Attenuation in Alaskan Soils,” a joint project between the AUTC, the Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities, the USDA Subarctic Agricultural Research Unit, and the Salcha-Delta Soil and Water Conservation District. As part of this project, he participated in controlled field testing in Delta Junction and Valdez, Alaska to determine how effective a combination of mechanical brush cutting and herbicide application might be in controlling vegetation.

Rhodes examined soil samples collected over the course of a year from field sites treated with a combination of mechanical mowing and herbicide. He analyzed these samples in the lab to track how quickly the herbicide chemicals diminished under varying climactic conditions, and what simpler compounds they formed as they broke down. Rhodes spent the winter analyzing his data and writing his thesis.

Study results will aid the AKDOT and the Alaska Railroad Corporation in making decisions on herbicide use in Alaska and on best practices for application.

The most challenging part of this project, Rhodes says, was mastering the logistics and organization involved in working with two remote field sites and multiple research partners to develop a strong, reliable experimental methodology.

Rhodes was chosen for this award based on his research achievements and his high GPA.

Wilhelm Muench

University of Alaska Fairbanks
Duckering Building

Wilhelm Muench won the 2007AUTC Outstanding Student Award, which allowed him to attend the Transportation Research Board 86th Annual Meeting held in Washington, D.C. on 21-25 January, 2007.

“Twelve thousand engineers all in a small area makes for an interesting bunch,” says Muench, who spent four days attending presentations on structures and bridges. His favorite was “Load and Resistance Design of Concrete Bridge Superstructures.” Muench says this type of structural design appeals to him because it allows an engineer to sketch out so many possible creative solutions. Although many designs are based on simple assumptions about stress and shear, “in reality, what’s happening in a beam is very complicated.” Many structural details common to bridge abutments, for instance, require more complex designs.

According to session presenter Shrinivas Balkrishna Bhide, Muench notes, “managers will hate this design method, because you can give the same problem to 20 engineers, and they’ll all give you different, correct answers.”

Muench, who is from Ketchikan, Alaska, will complete his M.S. in Civil Engineering this summer. In the future, he says, “what I should do is get a job in Fairbanks doing structural engineering, but I may run away and go surveying.”