Life Cycle Assessment of Representative Swiss Road Pavements for National Roads with an Accompanying Life Cycle Cost Analysis

The subject of this paper is an environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) of processes needed to construct and maintain representative Swiss asphalt, concrete and composite pavements (including subbase layers) applicable for the Swiss national road network over a period of 75 years. The environmental indicators analyzed are the Global Warming Potential indicator, the non-renewable Cumulative Energy Demand and the Swiss Ecological Scarcity indicator. Processes of the use phase of the road (fuel consumption, noise, etc.) have been evaluated qualitatively based on intensive research. The study shows that the Global Warming Potential of concrete and asphalt pavements equilibrates over the analysis period and that concrete pavements compared to asphalt and composite pavements offer advantages in regards to the non-renewable Cumulative Energy Demand, the Ecological Scarcity Indicator and Life Cycle Costs. The qualitative evaluation of the processes of the use phase shows for example the positive qualities of concrete pavements regarding fuel consumption and permanent noise properties

Testing Born's Rule in Quantum Mechanics for Three Mutually Exclusive Events

We present a new experimental approach using a three-path interferometer and find a tighter empirical upper bound on possible violations of Born's Rule. A deviation from Born's rule would result in multi-order interference. Among the potential systematic errors that could lead to an apparent violation we specifically study the nonlinear response of our detectors and present ways to calibrate this error in order to obtain an even better bound.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Found. Phy

Life Cycle Management of Infrastructures

By definition, life cycle management (LCM) is a framework “of concepts, techniques, and procedures to address environmental, economic, technological, and social aspects of products and organizations in order to achieve continuous ‘sustainable’ improvement from a life cycle perspective” (Hunkeler et al.\ua02001). Thus, LCM theoretically integrates all sustainability dimensions, and strives to provide a holistic perspective. It also assists in the efficient and effective use of constrained natural and financial resources to reduce negative impacts on society (Sonnemann and Leeuw\ua02006; Adibi et al.\ua02015). The LCM of infrastructures is the adaptation of product life cycle management (PLM) as techniques to the design, construction, and management of infrastructures. Infrastructure life cycle management requires accurate and extensive information that might be generated through different kinds of intelligent and connected information workflows, such as building information modeling (BIM)

Die südbairisch-mittelbairischen Lautgrenzen im Tiroler Unterland : bisherige Darstellung und Neuerhebung

von David GschösserUniversität Innsbruck, Masterarbeit, 2017(VLID)193689

Colloquium: New Philologies / Die Digitalisierung der Bestände des Tiroler Dialektarchivs : Ein Werkstattbericht zum vorläufigen Projektende

(VLID)449186

Hidden Ecological Potentials in the Production of Materials for Swiss Road Pavements

Sustainability has become a major concern in the field of civil infrastructures in recent years. Developing road construction projects with lower ecological impacts over a project’s entire life cycle can help in making road infrastructure contribute to sustainable development. This study focuses on the ecological potentials in the production of road materials used in Swiss road pavements. The environmental assessment was performed using a cradle-to-gate life-cycle assessment (LCA) approach in which all processes from the raw material extraction to the finished product were considered. The comparison of the results of the best-case asphalt pavement and the standard asphalt pavement for Swiss highway construction shows ecological potentials of up to 55%. Use of the best-case concrete pavement lowers the environmental impact by up to 53% in comparison to the worst-case concrete pavement for Swiss highways. Concerning composite pavements, the best-case variant offers an ecological potential 38% higher than the standard pavement