PROBLEM STATEMENT When designing and evaluating asphalt pavements, engineers must have an understanding of how the pavement materials will react to the stresses and strains of vehicle loads at varying temperatures. When a load is applied to asphalt concrete at a certain temperature, to what degree will the pavement "bounce back" to its original height? Pavement designers predict this spring-lik...

Backanalysis or backcalculation of in-service pavement mechanical properties (such as elastic modulus) from pavement Non-Destructive Test (NDT) deflection data is a routine practice carried out by highway engineers for pavement structural condition evaluation, remaining life calculations, and mechanistic-based analysis. Owing to the complexity of this ill-conditioned inverse modeling problem, n...

Crack evaluation is essential for effective classification of pavement cracks. Digital images of pavement cracks have been analyzed using techniques such as fuzzy set theory and neural networks. Bidimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD), a new image analysis method recently developed, can potentially be used for pavement crack evaluation. BEMD is an extension of the empirical mode decom...

In pavement management, prioritized resource allocation is imperative given the fact that there is rarely enough funding with highway agencies to address all the pavement sections. In view of the complexity involved in the decision making process, subjective evaluation based on expert’s judgments is unavoidable. Analytic Hierarchy process (AHP) has been applied by researchers to solve pavement ...

Urban heat island (UHI) countermeasures are of growing interest for cities. Field studies of their micro-climatic effects are scarce, yet are essential to properly evaluate their effectiveness and that of anti-UHI policies. The standard approach to determining their micro-climatic effects is to study the difference in measurements made at case and control stations. However, measurements conduct...

Government agencies and consulting companies in charge of pavement management face the challenge of maintaining pavements in serviceable conditions throughout their life from the functional and structural standpoints. For this, the assessment and prediction of the pavement conditions are crucial. This study proposes a neuro-fuzzy model to predict the performance of flexible pavements using the ...

This study proposes an inventory analysis method to evaluate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Portland cement concrete pavement construction, based on a case project in the west of China. The concrete pavement construction process was divided into three phases, namely raw material production, concrete manufacture and pavement onsite construction. The GHG emissions of the three phases are...

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have become significant environmental indicators in analyzing the comparative environmental impacts of conventional and newly developed alternative systems or techniques. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is considered an accepted and systematic methodology to calculate the amount of carbon released from all the processes of a system/technique, helping use...

Concrete pavement recycling is a relatively simple process that involves breaking, removing and crushing hardened concrete from an acceptable source to produce recycled concrete aggregate (RCA). The formal process of RCA production typically involves an initial evaluation of the existing source concrete; pavement preparation, which may include removal of an asphalt overlay; pavement breaking, r...