Vincent Franceschi, P.E. joins PSI as executive vice president

Vincent Franceschi, P.E., has joined PSI as an executive vice president overseeing PSI’s offices in western states. He has led engineering services, environmental consulting, and analytical laboratory services companies. His core market sector experience has been strongly related to the electric power, nuclear, oil and gas (pipeline), DOE, and local municipal waste/landfill agencies. Before joining PSI, he was involved in leading Exponent, Evans Analytical Group, ENV America, EMCON, and ABB Impell. Franceschi earned his Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and his MBA from St. Mary’s College. He will be based in PSI’s Oakland operations office.  

Professional Service Industries (PSI) (www.psiusa.com) is a consulting engineering and testing firm. PSI provides a range of environmental engineering and testing services, including environmental consulting, geotechnical engineering, construction materials testing and engineering, industrial hygiene services, facilities and roof consulting, and specialty engineering and testing services. Headquartered in Oakbrook Terrace, IL, a Chicago suburb, PSI operates from 100 offices in North America with more than 2,000 employees.

GEI Consultants’ Washington, D.C. office announces work on three major projects

GEI Consultants, a geotechnical, environmental, water resources, and ecological science and engineering firm, announces work on three new projects under the leadership of its Washington, D.C. office:

Washington Marriott Marquis Hotel, Washington D.C.

Hensel Phelps Construction Co. and D.C. Slurry Partners

GEI provided environmental, geotechnical, and construction services for the new $520 million, 105,000-square-foot Washington Marriott Marquis Hotel in Washington, D.C., set to be completed in May 2014. Services provided included environmental site investigation, soil pre-characterization, value engineering of the foundation system, design of deep drilled shafts for the top down construction scheme, and field oversight during foundation construction. For this project, seven below-grade stories were constructed that required the installation of drilled shaft foundations and interior building columns at depths of more than 100 feet below ground. A top-down construction technique was used, a method that builds the permanent structure members of the basement along with the excavation from the top to the bottom. The four-star Washington Marriott Marquis Hotel was designed to earn LEED Silver certification and will be one of the largest hotels in the country to earn this achievement. GEI designed the foundation system to help accelerate the construction schedule while saving costs and fulfilling project requirements.

Washington D.C. Water Clean Rivers Project, Blue Plains Tunnel, Washington D.C.

GEI is providing geotechnical consultation and field services to the consultant construction management team (CCM) for the $330 million Blue Plains Tunnel design-build project in Washington, D.C. The CCM team is managed by EPC consultants and consists of site-specific engineering consultants. D.C. Water is in the process of constructing a 24,000-foot-long soft ground tunnel, the first and largest in a network of tunnels that will capture and convey the combined sewer overflow (CSO) that currently impacts the health of the rivers in Washington, D.C. GEI’s services include geotechnical consultation, instrumentation submittal and design reviews, a variety of construction oversight services, and geotechnical data management services. When the tunneling work begins at the end of this year, GEI will provide oversight of the instrumentation system, which will measure ground movement along the tunnel alignment and at four major shaft sites during construction. The firm also contributed design review and field inspection services during the construction of slurry walls, which ensure that construction upholds the design tolerance for the excavation support.

Wolf Creek Dam Gallery and Plaza Grouting Project, Russell County, KY

GEI has completed work as the technical lead and quality control representative for the Judy Company (TJC) on the $10 million Wolf Creek Dam Gallery and Plaza Grouting rehabilitation project. The Wolf Creek Dam project is the most critical structure in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ national inventory of dams. The project involved installing grout curtains in the gallery and plaza areas of the dam. During the project, GEI also focused on safeguarding the local ecosystem, including the quality of the water feeding into the nearby Wolf Creek Fish Hatchery.

For more information, visit www.geiconsultants.com.

Century Engineering welcomes Thomas Hicks, P.E. to its Transportation Division

Century Engineering welcomes Thomas Hicks, P.E. as the director of business development for its Transportation Division.  Hicks will service clients throughout the Mid-Atlantic region and ensures Century’s commitment to providing traffic engineering solutions to guide and assist our government and commercial clients addressing traffic safety, engineering design, planning, and operational issues.

Hicks is a Maryland Registered Civil Engineer with a BSCE from the University of Maryland, and he completed the graduate school program of the Bureau of Highway Traffic at Yale University. Hicks taught traffic engineering for three years at the University of Oklahoma, and he was a guest lecturer and mentor in the Advanced Transportation Operations Program at the Texas Institute of Texas A&M University for five years. He also served as the state traffic engineer for the Maryland State Highway since 1968, and under the old State Roads Commission, he served as assistant chief engineer for traffic safety, later assistant chief engineer, and finally in 1991, his position was elevated to deputy chief engineer.

Century Engineering is a multidisciplinary engineering firm providing a range of engineering, surveying, and construction inspection services to government agencies and various industries throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. Century is headquartered in Hunt Valley, Maryland with offices in Delaware and Pennsylvania.

Merrick-McLaughlin Whitewater Design Group designs enhancements aiding in recovery of endangered native fish

At a recent ribbon-cutting ceremony, Merrick-McLaughlin Whitewater Design Group (M-MWDG) was recognized after providing hydraulic engineering expertise for design of the first known combined state-of-the-art fish passage and recreational whitewater facility in the United States. The project is located adjacent to an existing diversion dam on the Gunnison River near Delta, Colorado. The scope of work includes removal of a vertical drop at the dam and design and installation of hydraulically connected but independent channels to enable both fish passage and boat passage. The fish passage facility design allows native Colorado endangered fish to negotiate the diversion dam, promoting recovery of these species. The boat passage channel provides a high-performance recreational experience for river enthusiasts and boaters. Owned by the Hartland Irrigation Company, the existing dam was constructed in 1881 as a 6-foot high vertical structure to divert water to their canal. As originally constructed, the vertical dam did not allow upstream and downstream movement of fish and also prevented upstream and downstream navigation by boaters. The irrigation company and the Painted Sky Resource Conservation & Development Council (District) wanted these issues resolved and selected M-MWDG to provide engineering services to accomplish this mission. The project includes a multi-slot baffled fishway that orients weak swimming fish upstream and is hydraulically efficient in allowing passage of target species in a much shorter and less costly channel. This design also reduces debris accumulation and is a much lower hazard to boaters and river enthusiasts. The fish passage facility extends the upstream range of the Colorado native endangered fish by approximately 15 miles, which re-establishes and maintains the endangered fish population and improves the overall ecosystem health of the river. M-MWDG served as engineering consultant and provided multi-dimensional computer modeling, hydraulic analysis, alternative evaluation, design engineering, plan preparation, cost estimating, and construction phase support for the project while working closely with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). For more information, visit www.merrick.com.

Ohio University's sustainable energy research center awarded $1.9 million by NSF

The Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Environment (ISEE), a research center at Ohio University's Russ College of Engineering and Technology, was recently awarded a $1.9 million, four-year grant by the National Science Foundation to address alternative energy needs for future development of sustainable buildings. The project, "Sustainable Housing through Holistic Waste Stream Management and Algal Cultivation," aims to develop the fundamental information needed for designing, constructing, optimizing, and scaling up an algae-based power system to support the energy requirements and waste stream management of houses or residential communities.

Ben Stuart, ISEE director, associate professor of civil engineering, and principal investigator of the project, explains that currently, "off-grid" housing is often limited to using solar PV arrays and wind power for meeting electricity demands and solar thermal or ground-source geothermal for heating and cooling. And he adds that much of the current biofuels research is targeted toward transportation. "In contrast, this project seeks to extend biofuels applications to residential housing by using water and solid waste streams and applying carbon and nutrient recycling in the production of feedstocks for fuels, feed, and food. This will promote sustainable, off-grid housing, including holistic management of natural resources with minimal environmental impact."

The project is being supported by the NSF's Sustainable Energy Pathways (SEP) Program, part of a larger NSF initiative on "Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability." The SEP calls for innovative, interdisciplinary basic research in science, engineering, and education by teams of researchers developing systems approaches to sustainable energy based on a comprehensive view of the scientific, technical, environmental, economic, and societal issues.

According to Stuart, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering Guy Riefler and Assistant Professor of Economics Ariaster Chimeli will combine lab studies with advanced process modeling software to assess public acceptance and determine economic risks. "Our partners at Georgia Tech, led by Dr. Daniel Castro, will then use this information to develop scenarios for architectural design and construction in single residences, neighborhoods, and extended communities."

Stuart has a long track record in alternative fuels research, including work with ECO2Capture, a local company currently housed at OHIO's Innovation Center developing and demonstrating a polymer membrane system that can significantly increase algal growth for use in the CO2 capture and biofuel markets.

Virginia Tech engineers show how to include solar technologies as smart electric grid evolves

An economically feasible way to store solar energy in existing residential power networks is the subject of an award-winning paper written by two Virginia Tech electrical engineers and presented at an international conference. Reza Arghandeh of Blacksburg, VA, a doctoral candidate in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, won the best student paper award at the 20th International Conference on Nuclear Engineering, held in conjunction with the American Society of Mechanical Engineering Power 2012 in Anaheim, CA. His advisor is Robert Broadwater, professor of electrical and computer engineering, who specializes in electric power system analysis and design.


In their paper, they acknowledge that solar energy resources are "intermittent, seasonal, and non-dispatchable." However, the current national climate with its deregulation policies, electricity tariffs, control strategies, and demand management are "significant tools for flexible and resilient operation of power systems with photovoltaic adoption levels," Arghandeh argues. "Selling the household generated electricity into the electric energy market and the storage of electricity in storage systems and demand control systems provide a variety of economic opportunities for customers and utility companies to use more renewable resources," he adds.

Some residential houses are already doing just this -- selling power back to an electrical distribution industry. But Arghandeh and Broadwater's work provides an optimization algorithm for a distributed energy storage (DES) system on a broad scale. The system they developed presents a fleet of batteries connected to distribution transformers. The storage system can then be used for withholding distributed photovoltaic power before it is bid to market, Arghandeh explains. "Withholding distributed photovoltaic power, probably gained from rooftop panels, represents a gaming method to realize higher revenues due to the time varying cost of electricity." Arghandeh is referring to the peak usage of energy systems such as the early evening hours when families return home from school and from work versus the low-usage times that occur in the early morning hours when most households are asleep. "The distributed photovoltaic power adoption can be controlled with the help of real-time electricity price and load profile," he confirmed.


Today's power systems are moving towards a smart grid concept to improve their efficiencies, reliability, economics, and sustainability. Arhhandeh and Broadwater want to make sure that solar technologies are integrated with the existing technologies like energy storage and control systems. Specifically, the distributed energy storage system computation they devised is called a discrete ascent optimal programming approach. It insures convergence of the various power systems after a finite number of computational iterations. A solution determined by using their approach depends upon the day-ahead forecast of load variation, market prices, and photovoltaic generation. The output of their optimization algorithm is a distributed energy storage charging and discharging schedule with maximized operation benefits. Electrical Distribution Design (EDD) of Blacksburg, VA, a software company serving the utility industry, funded this research.

WSP SELLS announces new transportation department manager in Albany, NY

WSP SELLS announces that Brian Doherty, P.E. has joined the firm in its Albany, NY office. Doherty has 38 years of experience in transportation design work, most recently as design manager of the Major Projects Group for the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) Region 8 in Poughkeepsie, NY. As the Transportation Department manager of the Albany office, Mr. Doherty will lead WSP SELLS’ growth in the region and support the the office by expanding and enhancing the civil, municipal, and transportation teams. Doherty received his Bachelors of Science in Civil Engineering from The University of Massachusetts (UMass), Lowell. He is a registered Professional Engineer (P.E.) in New York and Massachusetts.

Through its combination with GENIVAR, WSP SELLS is a professional services firm working with governments, businesses, architects, and planners providing integrated solutions across many disciplines. The firm provides services to transform the built environment and restore the natural environment, and its expertise ranges from environmental remediation to urban planning, from engineering iconic buildings to designing sustainable transportation networks, and from developing the energy sources of the future to enabling new ways of extracting essential resources. It has 14,500 employees, including engineers, planners, project managers, technicians, environmental experts, and other specialists based in more than 300 offices across 35 countries on every continent.