CEE Ph.D. Student Md Ashikuzzaman (Ashik) Wins Robert L. Snyder Student Award
Content
Ph.D. student Md Ashikuzzaman (familiarly known as Ashik) of the UMass Amherst Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department has received a Robert L. Snyder Student Award from the International Centre for Diffraction Data (ICDD). As the ICDD summarized the purpose of its award, “In pursuing its dynamic commitment to the education of the scientific community, the ICDD is offering limited travel support to help students attend the 2024 Denver X-ray Conference.”
With the help of the award, Ashik was able to attend and present at the ICDD’s 73rd Annual Conference on Applications of X-ray Analysis, held from August 5th to 9th in Denver. To be eligible for the award, Ashik submitted an abstract and other supporting documents for evaluation, and after a critical review process he was selected as a recipient.
The award covered $1,000 in travel expenses and included a waiver of the conference registration fees. Ashik's poster, titled “Comprehensive Analysis of Glauconite Sand: DCB Treatment Effects on Mineral Composition,” was chosen for the XRD poster session, where he had the opportunity to present his research as part of the conference's technical program.
Ashik’s abstract encapsulated his research to understand the behavior of glauconitic sand, which is essential for the successful development of offshore wind projects on the East Coast of the U.S., by studying the glauconite sand belt along the coast of New Jersey.
Ashik’s research supervisors are CEE Professor Guoping Zhang and CEE Associate Professor Zachary Westgate. The research at UMass Amherst, led by Westgate, is titled “Piling in Glauconitic Sand: PIGS JIP,” which is managed by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute and sponsored by five offshore-wind developers.
As Ashik explained his research, “The glauconite sand belt in New Jersey, spanning over 100 miles in length and 10 to 20 miles in width from Raritan Bay to the Delaware River, offers distinct geological and environmental challenges and opportunities for research.”
According to Ashik, “This study investigates the preparation and treatment of glauconite sand samples, particularly those sourced from the Hornerstown and Navesink formations at a test site in central New Jersey, focusing on drying, grinding, and sodium dithionite-citrate-bicarbonate (DCB) treatment processes.”
Ashik noted that the DCB treatment was necessary to remove iron oxides and hydroxides coatings that could interfere with the accuracy of subsequent analyses. Ashik explained that he conducted qualitative and quantitative 1-D X-ray diffraction analyses on natural and DCB-treated samples at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, therefore revealing significant mineralogical changes.
Technically, the DCB treatment effectively removed the iron-hydroxysulphate and hydrotalcite mineral groups as well as iron oxides, thus eliminating jarosite and reducing gypsum, goethite, and pyrite contents.
As Ashik concluded, “These findings underscore the importance of thorough sample preparation and treatment in accurately characterizing the mineral composition of glauconite sands, [a process] which is essential for reliable site characterization and soil-structure-interaction analysis in offshore wind infrastructure development.”
Before attending UMass Amherst, Ashik completed his M.S. Degree in Offshore Geotechnical Engineering at Zhejiang University in China and his B.S. in Civil Engineering from Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology in Bangladesh. (August 2024)