Travis Fillmore

Engineer Research and Development Center - U.S. Army | ERDC US Army · Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory

Inland navigation systems facilitate barge traffic, the most efficient tonnage per fuel method of transportation. Miter gates allow barges to bypass navigational dams. The Dalles downstream miter gate has experienced numerous instances of cracking, threatening its continued operation and shipping on the Columbia River. The earliest instance of crac...

Vision-based displacement measurement is promising for infrastructure applications because of its ability to cover traditionally hard-to-access regions, as well as its ability to enable simultaneous dense displacement measurements over large areas within a short time period. This paper proposes, demonstrates, and evaluates a visionbased strategy to...

Miter gates are critical components of locks and dams of inland waterways for facilitating movement of vessels between different water elevations. Closure of locks and dams due to gate failure or unexpected maintenance stalls barge traffic, leading to goods hardly reaching the market as well as huge economic loss. Therefore, continuous condition mo...

Tainter gates are commonly used as water control gates on civil infrastructure, with one such gate in use at the lock and dam at The Dalles, Oregon on the Columbia River. Under normal operating conditions, Tainter gates should be hoisted in a level fashion throughout the circular path they travel. Uneven hoisting may lead to a redistribution of loa...

This paper proposes a hybrid crack estimation technique that utilizes digital images from cameras and physics-based simulations to perform online diagnosis and prognosis of miter gate. To fully capture the localized effect of the crack, a global-local coupled finite element (FE) model is first created. An iterative global-local (IGL) algorithm is t...

Current health monitoring approaches for large structures mostly rely on a combination of distributed sensor networks and in-situ inspection. This paper presents a novel online diagnostics and prognostics framework for structures subject to multiple failure modes and demonstrates the proposed method with a high-fidelity finite element model using m...

Physics-based digital twins often require many computations to diagnose current and predict future damage states in structures. This research proposes a novel iterative global–local method, where the local numerical model is replaced with a surrogate to simulate cracking quickly on large steel structures. The iterative global–local method bridges t...

The United States Army Corps of Engineers assumes that horizontally framed miter gates thrust into lock chamber walls under hydraulic head. However, in many gates the bottom hinge, a fixed pintle, interrupts this thrusting action by taking a portion of the load itself. As the fixed pintle is not designed for such loading, the resulting high pintle...

Operational condition assessments, using a discrete rating system, are frequently used by field engineers to assess inland navigation assets and components. Challenges such as the occasional inability to perform inspections (such as the case with locks watered in an operational state) and protocol requirements requiring ratings even when they aren'...

The upstream lock gate at The Dalles Lock and Dam on the Columbia River is a radial, or Tainter, gate. Tainter gates operate by being raised and lowered through a circular path by means of hoisting cables. The continued operability of the gate is of extreme economic importance to the Columbia River basin region, as the gates facilitate the transpor...

The US inland navigation system facilitates the transportation of billions of dollars of goods annually, with lock gates being a major component of the system. Miter-type gates are the most common found in the US and are typically designed to bear continuously against the lock chamber wall along the height of the gate in the region known as the quo...

Navigation lock chambers have gates that act both as damming surfaces for water and as doorways for vessels to enter and exit. Miter gates are by far the most common type of lock gate in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inventory. Horizontally framed miter gates are designed to bear continuously against the lock chamber wall along the height of the...

This paper focuses on preconditioners for the conjugate gradient method and their applications to the Generalized FEM with global-local enrichments (GFEMgl) and the Stable GFEMgl. The preconditioners take advantage of the hierarchical struture of the matrices in these methods and the fact that most of the matrix does not change when simulating for...

An algorithm for non-intrusively coupling a commercial finite element software with a research code implementing a hierarchical enrichment of finite element spaces is presented. Examples of hierarchical methods supported by the algorithm are the Generalized or eXtended FEM (GFEM), the scale-bridging GFEM with numerically defined enrichment function...

This paper focuses on preconditioners for the conjugate gradient method and their applications to the Generalized FEM with global-local enrichments (GFEMgl) and the Stable GFEMgl. The preconditioners take advantage of the hierarchical struture of the matrices in these methods and the fact that most of the matrix does not change when simulating for...

Kaleidocycles are continuously rotating n-jointed linkages. We consider a certain class of six-jointed kaleidocycles which have a spring at each joint. For this class of kaleidocycles, stored energy varies throughout the rotation process in a nonconstant, cyclic pattern. The purpose of this paper is to model and provide an analysis of the stored en...