Browse all of our pavements related research briefs below, or explore by topic via the links in the right side bar (on desktop browsers) or at the bottom of this page (on mobile browsers).
A culmination of several years of multidisciplinary collaboration, this report by researchers from CSHub, Oregon State University, and the...
Due to climate change, air temperatures will rise dramatically over the next century—especially in urban areas. The City of Boston, for instance, predicts that by 2050 its average summer air...
Today, departments of transportation must solve the nation’s infrastructure crisis while facing ever-greater backlogs for repair. CSHub has found that implementing long-term planning and...
Healthy markets require robust competition. The paving materials market, though, possesses relatively little competition between industries and, as a result, has unnecessarily high unit costs. If...
The alkali-silica-reaction, a leading cause of deterioration in concrete, has been studied extensively—yet some of its mechanisms remain unclear....
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the backlog of repairs for existing highways is $420 billion. To help state transportation departments manage these backlogs and improve their...
Many strategies, including renewable energy production and carbon taxes, have been considered to reach climate targets. However, transportation agencies often overlook how their own pavement...
While it is commonly believed that the environmental footprint of pavements derives only from their construction and materials, a large proportion of that footprint actually comes from their use...
In this research brief we propose a new way to understand the cause of freeze-thaw damage in cement. While conventional thinking attributes the damage to pressure generated by expansion of water...
With low funding and high backlogs for repair, state agencies must effectively allocate budgets for the maintenance, rehabilitation and reconstruction of highways. To assist this mission, CSHub...
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The MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) is conducting life cycle environmental and cost analyses of pavements under a wide range of contexts. The analyses involve the comparison of new asphalt...
How does pavement roughness affect a vehicle's fuel consumption? This report explores how roughness is measured, how different pavement materials deteriorate over time in terms of roughness, and...
The future price of infrastructure materials is challenging to predict. This report descibes a method developed by CSHub to predict future prices of concrete and asphalt by using the historic...
A brief overview of pavement-vehicle interaction and deflection-based modeling geared towards practitioners, policy-makers, and the general public.
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CSHub releases comprehensive research report on the impact of deflection induced PVI for life cycle assessment of pavements. It includes a detailed description of model development and application...
Methods, Impacts, and Opportunities in the Concrete
Because of the enormous environmental and economic impact of infrastructure in the United States, there is a growing need to better understand the life cycle performance of structures and to...
A culmination of several years of multidisciplinary collaboration, this report by researchers from CSHub, Oregon State University, and the...
For life cycle cost analyses (LCCAs) to provide the best information possible and lead to better decisions, the cost estimates must reflect, as accurately as possible, the most likely expenditures...
A novel mechanistic model based on an infinite beam on elastic foundation is developed to quantify the impact of pavement structural and material properties on pavement deflection and consequently...
We present a comparative life cycle assessment of pavements considering measurement uncertainty and the data-quality uncertainty. We account for the uncertainty due to the prediction of roughness...
The dissipation occurring below a moving tire in steady-state conditions in contact with a viscoelastic pavement is expressed using two different reference frames: a fixed observer attached to the...
Life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) is an important tool for evaluating the merits of alternative investments. Inevitably, inputs for an LCCA are subject to a high level of uncertainty in both the...
Concrete pavements are a vital part of the transportation infrastructure, comprising nearly 25% of the interstate network in the United States. With transportation authorities and industry...
The accuracy and the comprehensiveness of any pavement life-cycle assessment are limited by the ability of the supporting science to quan- tify the environmental impact. Pavement–vehicle...
Increasing the sustainability of our infrastructure is accomplished in ways other than just developing better materials and using recycled materials: it is also about employing the right designs....
The goal of the present Life Cycle Assessment study is to evaluate the environmental impact over the lifetime of one square meter (the functional unit) of the two most common pavement categories:...