Buffalo on the Beaches: Electronic Imaging of Historical Sources

We called it La Riviere aux Boeuf, that is, the River of Bullocks, by reason of the great number of them there was about it. These bullocks are very like ours; there are thousands of them, ~ut instead of hair they have a very long curled sort of wool. Thus did Henri Joutel in 1685 describe what we believe to be the Guadalupe River in Texas in his Historical Journal of Monsieur de la Salle\u27s Last Voyage to Discover the River Mississippi. 1 The bullocks, boeuf , that Joutel described were American bison. In 1686, near Apalachioca, Florida, and Dothan, Alabama, explorer Marcos Delgado described the beasts he encountered as a kind of animal like cows. 2 The buffalo are gone from the coasts of Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, but the documents describing the area when they existed are still available

Modelling the Environmental and Economic Life Cycle Performance of Maximizing Asphalt Recycling on Road Pavement Surfaces in Europe

The road pavement industry, worldwide, has often shown reluctance in quickly implementing innovative practices; however, in the case of raw material consumption, a cultural change is necessary and, in this sense, sustainability assessment could play a major role. Along these lines, this research study aims to provide evidence to all the involved stakeholders (material producers, pavement contractors, and road authorities) of how life cycle-based techniques can be crucial in evaluating whether the adoption of asphalt mixtures with high contents of reclaimed asphalt (RA) for wearing courses is actually a sustainable practice for major European roads. An evaluation framework composed of a life cycle assessment, to calculate the carbon footprint of both pavement materials and pavement activities, and a life cycle cost assessment, performed to determine the overall economic burden of the related road pavement surface courses and maintenance strategies over a sixty-year analysis period, is presented and applied to selected case studies. These were developed together with three major European national road authorities and include scenarios involving the construction of road surfaces with asphalt mixtures containing up to 90% RA. Results have shown that whenever high-content RA mixes do not under-perform against conventional mixtures, up to 50% CO2eq savings can be registered and up to 60% economic cost reductions can be reported. The durability of road pavement layers remains a key parameter for any road pavement sustainability assessment exercises; therefore, in order to adapt the obtained results to other contexts, researchers should always consider conducting a sensitivity analysis of the reference service life and/or road authorities should somehow request road pavement durability as a pre-requisite within procurement practices

Rolling resistance contribution to a road pavement life cycle carbon footprint analysis

Purpose Although the impact of road pavement surface condition on rolling resistance has been included in the life cycle assessment (LCA) framework of several studies in the last years, there is still a high level of uncertainty concerning the methodological assumptions and the parameters that can affect the results. In order to adopt pavement carbon footprint/LCA as a decision-making tool, it is necessary to explore the impact of the chosen methods and assumptions on the LCA results. Methods This paper provides a review of the main models describing the impact of the pavement surface properties on vehicle fuel consumption and analyses the influence of the methodological assumptions related to the rolling resistance on the LCA results. It compares the CO2 emissions, calculated with two different rolling resistance models existing in literature, and performs a sensitivity test on some specific input variables (pavement deterioration rate, traffic growth, and emission factors/fuel efficiency improvement). Results and discussion The model used to calculate the impact of the pavement surface condition on fuel consumption significantly affects the LCA results. The pavement deterioration rate influences the calculation in both models, while traffic growth and fuel efficiency improvement have a limited impact on the vehicle CO2 emissions resulting from the pavement condition contribution to rolling resistance. Conclusions and recommendations Existing models linking pavement condition to rolling resistance and hence vehicle emissions are not broadly applicable to the use phase of road pavement LCA and further research is necessary before a widely-used methodology can be defined. The methods of modelling and the methodological assumptions need to be transparent in the analysis of the impact of the pavement surface condition on fuel consumption, in order to be interpreted by decision makers and implemented in an LCA framework. This will be necessary before product category rules (PCR) for pavement LCA can be extended to include the use phase

A systematic assessment of road pavement sustainability through a review of rating tools

Pavements are engineered systems present in every modern society, and they have significant environmental, economic and social impacts. In an effort to promote more sustainable decisions regarding pavement design, construction and management, several pavement sustainability assessment tools have been developed. This research reviewed some of these tools and found that many of them do not treat the pavement as a system; instead, they seek to optimize individual aspects of the pavement in an effort to increase its sustainability. Therefore, a framework for analytically assessing the system outcomes towards sustainable objectives is presented and applied for modern pavement sustainability assessment. The results suggest that this framework provides a way to systematically include data in the evaluation of the outcomes of pavement management decisions towards achieving sustainable objectives

European National Road Authorities and Circular Economy: An Insight into Their Approaches

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 authorities and NRAs. To do so, a questionnaire was sent to di erent NRAs and an online search was conducted to identify the ways that NRAs communicate their CE practices. Findings indicate that, although the majority of the NRAs are familiar with CE as a concept, not many actions have been taken so far towards its holistic implementation. Finally, there is a significant lack of CE expertise and communication within these bodies.European Union's Horizon 2020 Program under the Marie Curie-Sklodowska actions for research, technological development, and demonstration 721493CEDR Transnational Research Programm

A sustainability performance-based assessment too for ecodesign of roads and railways

SETAC Europe 28th Annual Meeting, ROME, ITALIE, 13-/05/2018 - 17/05/2018Addressing the sustainability of transport infrastructures requires exploring the environmental, social, and economic impacts of technological options while balancing the often conflicting priorities of different stakeholders, at an early design phase of the infrastructure delivery process. That is a typical multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, in which the decision-makers need to measure the sustainability through a set of meaningful, representative and quantifiable criteria, balance the relative importance of those criteria and determine the sustainability sequence of multiple alternative technologies for fostering transportation sustainability. This paper describes a tool and a methodology developed in the framework of Super&ITN project

Pavement life cycle management: Towards a sustainability assessment framework in Europe

Pavement Life Cycle Management is a 2-year international project aiming at supporting European National Road Authorities (NRAs) to introduce sustainability in their practices by providing training on Life Cycle techniques and a user-friendly package to support their widespread implementation. The first task in Pavement Life Cycle Management (PavementLCM) project is the creation of a Sustainability Assessment (SA) framework that complies with EN15643-5 and consequently include the three pillars of sustainability, use a life cycle approach and use quantifiable sustainability performance indicators. This paper presents the first steps towards the creation of the framework which includes the following steps: 1) review of the available Product Category Rules (PCRs) related to asphalt mixtures and pavement activities; 2) definition of the object of the assessment; 3) review and survey of NRAs practices of the main research efforts in Europe towards the definition of sustainability performance indicators

Uncertainty analysis of life cycle assessment of asphalt surfacings

The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of asphalt pavements are associated with significant uncertainty resulting from variability in the quantity and impact of individual components, the quality of data for each component, and variability of asphalt durability. This study presents a framework to quantify and incorporate the uncertainty of LCA and asphalt durability data into LCA of asphalt surfacings. The suggested framework includes: estimating the uncertainty of asphalt production processes by the pedigree matrix method, conducting a deterministic LCA, applying Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) to estimate the probability density functions (PDFs) of the considered impacts using the uncertainty data, deterministic solution, and asphalt durability. This framework was applied to six asphalt mixtures; the results show that there is significant uncertainty in the processes that contribute to the environmental impacts. They also showed that considering asphalt durability and its uncertainty is critical and can significantly change the results and interpretation of LCA

Systematic study of the effect of ultrasound gel on the performances of time-domain diffuse optics and diffuse correlation spectroscopy

Recently, multimodal imaging has gained an increasing interest in medical applications thanks to the inherent combination of strengths of the different techniques. For example, diffuse optics is used to probe both the composition and the microstructure of highly diffusive media down to a depth of few centimeters, but its spatial resolution is intrinsically low. On the other hand, ultrasound imaging exhibits the higher spatial resolution of morphological imaging, but without providing solid constitutional information. Thus, the combination of diffuse optical imaging and ultrasound may improve the effectiveness of medical examinations, e.g. for screening or diagnosis of tumors. However, the presence of an ultrasound coupling gel between probe and tissue can impair diffuse optical measurements like diffuse optical spectroscopy and diffuse correlation spectroscopy, since it may provide a direct path for photons between source and detector. A systematic study on the effect of different ultrasound coupling fluids was performed on tissue-mimicking phantoms, confirming that a water-clear gel can produce detrimental effects on optical measurements when recovering absorption/reduced scattering coefficients from time-domain spectroscopy acquisitions as well as particle Brownian diffusion coefficient from diffuse correlation spectroscopy ones. On the other hand, we show the suitability for optical measurements of other types of diffusive fluids, also compatible with ultrasound imaging