Search results for "strade"
showing 10 items of 396 documents
The Sustainability of Reclaimed Asphalt as a Resource for Road Pavement Management through a Circular Economic Model
2019
The transition of the road engineering industry to a circular way of doing business requires more efficient and sustainable resources, energy, and waste management. The rates in which reclaimed asphalt is being recycled or reused in the asphalt mixture production process constitutes a crucial parameter in this transition. This paper aims at establishing a further step towards the combined circularity and sustainability of asphalt pavements, by introducing a framework for quantifying their Material Circularity Index. The framework is based on the methodology proposed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and accordingly tailored for the context of asphalt pavements. This study, thus, attempts to…
European National Road Authorities and Circular Economy: An Insight into Their Approaches
2020
The pavement engineering industry, having realized the significance of the impacts that it imposes on the environment through the production, construction and management of its products and assets, has been driven towards a more sustainable and circular way of operating. This has partly been through asphalt recycling, which is an area that many road authorities have prioritized. However, not all the National Road Authorities (NRAs) and/or sector stakeholders seem to be adequately familiar with the Circular Economy (CE) concept. This paper attempts to assist the transition of NRAs to a more circular way of doing business, by analyzing the current situation of CE within national/regional auth…
Compaction of Open-Graded HMAs Evaluated by a Fuzzy Clustering Technique
2015
The aim of this paper is the proposal of an expeditious procedure to be used during the execution of an asphalt layer for improving the compaction task. This procedure, based on a fuzzy clustering technique, starts from the knowledge of some information recorded by ordinary measuring instruments and provides an aid to the decision-maker on the number of roller passes needed to achieve a specific density at a certain temperature. This result can be deduced with great rapidity during the paving operations on site without waiting for the time spent in the core extraction and in the subsequent laboratory analysis. In this way it is possible to identify more precisely which aspects of the execut…
Image-based 3D reconstruction using traditional and UAV datasets for analysis of road pavement distress
2018
Abstract On local and urban networks, the enduring issue of scarce resources for Maintenance, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction strategies (MR&R) has led, in many cases, to using unadjusted or poor techniques for road pavement distress detection and analysis, yielding ineffective or even counterproductive results. Therefore, it is necessary to have tools that can carry out quick, reliable and low-cost assessment surveys. This paper aims at validating the use of innovative and low-cost technologies for road pavement analysis, assessing their potentialities for improving the automation and reliability of distress detection. A Structure from Motion (SfM) technique is analyzed at different alt…
Towards More Sustainable Pavement Management Practices Using Embedded Sensor Technologies
2019
Road agencies are constantly being placed in difficult situations when making road maintenance and rehabilitation decisions as a result of diminishing road budgets and mounting environmental concerns for any chosen strategies. This has led practitioners to seek out new alternative and innovative ways of monitoring road conditions and planning maintenance routines. This paper considers the use of innovative piezo-floating gate (PFG) sensors and conventional strain gauges to continuously monitor the pavement condition and subsequently trigger maintenance activities. These technologies can help develop optimized maintenance strategies as opposed to traditional ad-hoc approaches, which often le…
Recommendation of RILEM TC237-SIB on cohesion test of recycled asphalt
2018
This recommendation describes how to evaluate the presence of potentially active bitumen in recycled asphalt (RA) materials through the cohesion test. The experimental protocol is designed according to the research performed by the RILEM Technical Committee 237-SIB ‘‘Testing and characterization of sustainable innovative bituminous materials and systems’’ with the purpose, to develop a new, simple and fast method for the characterization of RA while limiting the need for conventional rheological tests. The guidelines in this recommendation focus on the testing procedure including specimen preparation, data analysis and provide information on the preparation of a tests report.
Passenger Car Equivalents for Heavy Vehicles at Roundabouts. a Synthesis Review
2019
Passenger Car Equivalents (PCEs in the following) are used to transform a mixed fleet of vehicles into a fleet of equivalent passenger cars and to analyze capacity and level-of-service of roads and intersections. Most roundabouts guidelines propose constant values for PCEs but a single PCE value can result improper under heterogeneous traffic conditions. PCEs should be vary with traffic and road conditions and consequently PCEs applied to undersaturated traffic conditions can overestimate the heavy vehicle effect or be not sensitive to the traffic level or characteristics of heavy vehicles. Compared to other at-grade intersections, the interaction between the operational performances of the…
Estimation of Passenger Car Equivalents for Two-Lane and Turbo Roundabouts Using AIMSUN
2020
The paper addresses issues related to Passenger Car Equivalents (PCEs) at roundabouts. Compared to other road units, the curvilinear elements of roundabout geometric design may impose greater constraints on vehicular trajectories and have a significant effect on the swept envelope of heavy vehicles. Specifically, the aim of the paper is to present the methodological approach which used traffic microsimulation to estimate PCEs. Focus is made on a case study which considered the conversion of a two-lane roundabout into a basic turbo roundabout with comparable size. Empirical capacity functions for both roundabouts were derived as target values to which simulated capacities by lane were compar…
A Microsimulation-Based Modelling Approach for Connected and Automated Vehicles on Roundabouts
2023
Connectivity and automation are technologies applied in combination to achieve increases in road safety, traffic efficiency and energy savings. Despite their potential, there are still many open questions regarding how roadway capacity will be affected and what methods should be employed to assess the expected benefits in the transportation domain. In this paper “what-if” scenarios were modelled in Aimsun Next to analyse assumption-based behaviour of automated vehicles operating with a cooperative adaptive cruise control system on roundabouts. The idea behind the study comes from the availability of the capacity adjustment factors for connected and automated vehicles provided by the Highway…
Comparative life-cycle assessment of conventional (double lane) and non-conventional (turbo and flower) roundabout intersections
2016
Abstract This research studied and compared different construction techniques for the road subgrade, embankment and pavement of different types of roundabout intersections in order to assess their environmental sustainability. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was carried out on double lane, turbo- and flower roundabouts. We considered virgin materials and reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) for the pavement construction. Also the environmental effects due to in situ lime stabilization of fine-grained soils were assessed in order to reduce the use of virgin material in road subgrades. The use of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) can lead to a significant reduction in pollutant emissions and energy …