SUP R DSS: A sustainability-based decision support & system for road pavements
Road pavement community members are increasingly becoming aware of the need to incorporating the principles of sustainable development into the sector. Policies are also going in this direction and as a consequence in the recent years researchers and practitioners are coming up with new materials, technologies and practices designed to reduce the negative impacts of their activities in the surroundings. Within this framework the road pavements sector is witnessing a paradigm shift towards the development of pavement technologies incorporating high-content of recycled materials, as well as best practices to decrease the overall carbon footprint. These are all promising solutions that to the …
SUP&R DST: SUstainable pavement & railways decision support tool
6th International Symposium on Life-Cycle Civil Engineering, IALCCE 2018; Ghent; Belgium; 28 October 2018 through 31 October 2018, GHENT, BELGIQUE, 28-/10/2018 - 31/10/2018; In order to help the decisions makers to efficiently address eco-design for transport infrastructure technologies, a decision support toll (DST) was developed in the scope of the training-through-research programme Sustainable Pavements & Railways Initial Training Network (www.superitn.eu). It consists of a computational platform that implements a conceptual framework developed to quantify sustainability. It comes with a set of sustainability indicators tailored to both road and railway systems as well as several ob…
Life cycle assessment of low temperature asphalt mixtures for road pavement surfaces: A comparative analysis
The increasing fuel consumption demand, the accelerated pressure imposed by the depletion of 5 scarce raw materials and the urgent environmental protection requirements are forcing the change of 6 pavement industry and academia community’s research endeavors towards the development of low 7 emissions road paving technologies able to significantly reduce mixing and compaction temperature as 8 well as the consumption of virgin raw materials. One set of relatively recent technologies in the field of 9 pavement materials that aims at addressing those concerns are the warm mix asphalt (WMA). In fact, 10 they have the potential to allow the reduction of energy consumption and airborne emissions d…
A comparative life-cycle assessment of asphalt mixtures for railway sub-ballast containing alternative materials
Abstract Bituminous sub-ballast in railway track-bed can mitigate the variation of the moisture content in the subgrade and reduce vertical stiffness variations of the track leading to a more durable infrastructure. Nevertheless, durability is only one of the aspects that affects the sustainability of an infrastructure. Other relevant aspects are related to the environmental and economic issues. This research work joins the worldwide effort towards a paradigm shift in civil engineering devoted to assess the sustainability of infrastructures at the design stage. With this in mind, in this study different alternative bituminous sub-ballast mixtures containing recycled materials, namely crumb …