Hessam AzariJafari

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Verified

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• Ph.D; LEED Green Associate
• Researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Purpose Several efforts have attempted to incorporate the sources of uncertainty and variability into the life cycle assessment (LCA) of pavements. However, no method has been proposed that can simultaneously consider data quality, methodological choices, and variability in inputs and outputs without the need for complementary software. This study...

The comparability of environmental product declarations (EPDs) and the heterogeneity of their life cycle assessment (LCA) methods are considered the main challenges facing the credibility of results. In this study, a probabilistic tool was proposed and developed to gain insight into what is necessary to achieve the unrealized vision of comparable E...

The impacts of climate conditions, the geometry of concrete in use, and end-of-life and surface treatment actions have received little attention in previous studies of carbon uptake calculation. This work attempts to advance the knowledge of pavement carbon uptake based on a bottom-up approach and using state-level data to estimate the carbon uptak...

We implemented a context-sensitive and prospective framework to assess the global warming potential (GWP) impacts of cool pavement strategies on specific roads for different cities. The approach incorporates several interconnections among different elements of the built environment, such as buildings and urban road segments, as well as the transpor...

Purpose Several studies have evaluated GHG mitigation solutions for asphalt and concrete mixtures at the network level. However, proposed solutions usually focus on partial decarbonization; the simultaneous interactions and effects of these solutions have not been fully studied. In this study, the state-level embodied carbon attributed to the U.S....

Transport is the second-largest contributor to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, it is crucial to establish a benchmark for the carbon intensity of the road transportation sector. This assessment should encompass not only the impact of paving materials and road construction practice, but also consider the entire lifecycle of roads,...

Pavement surface smoothness (or roughness) is crucial for traffic safety, driving comfort, and fuel efficiency. As a widely applied roughness indicator, an accurate forecasting of the International Roughness Index (IRI) and its deterioration is essential for the design, maintenance, and management of asphalt pavements. Previous studies have used fi...

Cement production contributes to over 6% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, driven by clinker’s energy-intensive production and limestone calcination. Substituting clinker with cementitious substitutes is an effective strategy for decarbonization. However, typical clinker substitutes—coal fly ash and ground granulated blast furnace slag—face...

This study presents a novel framework to address the challenges of extensive data requirements and uncertainties in road pavement life cycle assessment (LCA). We introduce a streamlined framework that employs a structured data underspecification approach. In this study, we categorized the required data into four specificity levels (M1 to M4) to man...

Written in collaboration with industry and other academic institutions, our new interim report proposes a framework to account for carbon uptake in Product Category Rules (PCRs) for creating EPDs for cement-based products (CBPs).

Transportation-related emissions are a major contributor to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and are closely linked to pavement performance. Effective pavement treatment practices are crucial for sustaining pavement performance and mitigating associated GHG emissions. Although the treatment optimization for individual segments is well-studied,...

In the realm of rehabilitating existing jointed plain concrete pavement (JPCP) or continuous reinforced concrete pavement (CRCP), the conventional choice is asphalt concrete (AC) overlays due to the cost-effectiveness of their initial construction and rapid traffic accessibility. However, AC overlays tend to deteriorate more quickly in structural p...

Synopsis: Worldwide, the need for additional and improved infrastructure is critical. The deterioration of infrastructure has become an increasing challenge and burden on the world's economy, environment, and society. Historically, most structures worldwide have been built without durability and service-life consideration, and their premature failu...

As the extent of carbon uptake varies dramatically from one cement-based product to another, it is essential to employ an approach that captures the context in the estimation of building carbon uptake. In this study, we propose a bottom-up framework for modeling the lifetime carbon uptake of concrete and mortar applications at the building level....

The use of environmental product declarations (EPDs) of concrete and other construction materials is gaining momentum. EPDs should enable an informed selection of products with a lower environmental footprint, hence the issue of EPD comparability is highly relevant. In this paper, we identified and discussed the present shortcomings and future oppo...

Roads play a key role in movements of goods and people but require large amounts of materials emitting greenhouse gases to be produced. This study assesses the global road material stock and the emissions associated with materials' production. Our bottom-up approach combines georeferenced paved road segments with road length statistics and archetyp...

The overdesign of concrete mixtures and substandard concrete acceptance testing practices significantly impact the concrete industry's role in sustainable construction. This study evaluates the impact of overdesign on the sustainability of concrete and embodied carbon emissions at the national and project scales. In addition, this paper reviews qua...

The expansion of road networks in emerging economies such as China causes significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This development is conflicting with China's commitment to achieve carbon neutrality. Thus, there is a need to better understand life cycle emissions of road infrastructure and opportunities to mitigate these emissions. Existing imp...

Research and practice on concrete incorporating solid wastes have found many advocates in recent years. Despite significant advancements, the connecting link between the performance of concrete incorporating solid wastes and its environmental impacts is not fully captured. The current review article aims to address the dependency between concrete p...

Every year, considerable amounts of waste materials are produced and landfilled due to the construction, maintenance, and rehabilitation of road pavements. As a result, the road pavement sector is under increasing societal pressure to mitigate the negative environmental impacts arising from these construction and maintenance activities. Among other...

Performance-based planning is an important tool for allocating treatment resources across a pavement network from a set of candidate treatments with a budget constraint. Existing research focuses on improving allocation decisions through changes in the optimization algorithm without considering the consequences of how optimization analyses are fram...

Significance Changes to concrete production as well as in building and pavements systems—the largest consumers of concrete—can lead to more than 50% reductions in associated GHG emissions by 2050. Over this period, the operational phase of newly constructed buildings and pavements still generates most GHG emissions unless the electrical grid, heati...

We implemented a context-sensitive and prospective framework to assess the global warming potential (GWP) impacts of cool pavement strategies on specific roads for different cities. The approach incorporates several interconnections among different elements of the built environment, such as buildings and urban road segments, as well as the transpor...

The concrete manufacturing supply chain is one of the most carbon-intensive systems in the construction industry. Decision-making based on a multi-objective approach that accommodates the environmental impacts of concrete manufacturing has been rarely investigated. To fill this gap, a sustainable closed-loop supply chain (SCLSC) model was conceived...

The main objectives of this review are to identify the advanced strategies and research gaps in the integration of BIM-LCA approaches and to propose research opportunities for promoting the progress of BIM-based LCA. To achieve this goal, a systematic literature review was conducted. Considering the ISO standard framework for conducting LCA, we ana...

The incorporation of natural pozzolans into the binder has been considered as an effective method for reducing the climate change impact of concrete mixtures. When quantifying the environmental impacts of concrete mixtures with and without natural pozzolans and with equivalent mechanical properties, their lifespan has been usually overlooked. The i...

Concrete is a critical component of deep decarbonization efforts because it impacts the building, transportation, and industrial sectors. We use a bottom-up model of current and future building and pavement stocks and construction in the US to contextualize the role of concrete in greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions strategies under projected and ambit...

Executive Summary The comparability of environmental product declarations (EPDs) and the heterogeneity of their life cycle assessment (LCA) methods are considered the main challenges facing the credibility of results. The objective of this project is to promote the robustness and accuracy of the comparability in concrete mixture decision-making bas...

Various methods have been proposed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with transportation. We investigate the potential of increasing the elastic modulus of pavement surface layers across the entire US pavement network as a means of lowering vehicle excess fuel consumption (EFC) due to deflection-induced pavement-vehicle interactio...

This contribution details a high-resolution approach to estimate the net greenhouse gas (GHG) impact of changing pavement albedo in urban areas by accounting for both changes in air temperature and building energy demand (BED) caused by the albedo change. The approach uses machine-learning-based meta-models that allow stakeholders to estimate the i...

The Eco Concrete Competition was proposed by ACI Committee 130 in 2014 with the goal of promoting mixture design as an important aspect of concrete sustainability. The rules require students to design two mixtures with the same water-binder ratio (w/b) but different constituents: the base case scenario (BCS) and the alternative case scenario (ACS)....

To meet the targets for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions set by cities and states, several solu­tions have been proposed including renewable energy production, subsidies for electric vehicles, and carbon taxes. However, transportation authorities have not considered the role of pavements as a means of reach­ing GHG targets. In fact, apart fr...

To meet the targets for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions set by cities and states, several solutions have been proposed including renewable energy production, subsidies for electric vehicles, and carbon taxes. However, transportation authorities have not considered the role of pavements as a means of reaching GHG targets. In fact, apart from...

The unique fresh and hardened properties of high-performance self-consolidating concrete (HPSCC) lead to an extensive application of this mixture in high-rise buildings. In this paper, the elevated temperature resistivity of 19 HPSCC mixtures incorporating binary and ternary blends of fly ash, silica fume, natural zeolite, and metakaolin was invest...

While the main findings of this paper can be found in the main manuscript, description of modeling details, input data, and supporting results are provided in the supporting information.

This Excel file includes all the input data used for modeling the case study.

Lack of dynamic accounting in consequential life cycle assessment (CLCA) can keep policy-makers from having an accurate analysis of emission flows over time. In this study, we propose a dynamic CLCA framework to assess the environmental consequences of pavements. Dynamic changes in the demand vector and technosphere matrices were computed using rel...

Purpose Conferences are an important element of scientific activity but can also be a major cause of environmental burden. With this in mind, we analysed the global warming emissions of the 2017 annual conference of the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment (ACLCA), in order to estimate the carbon footprint and identify potential ways to reduce...

Portland limestone cement (PLC) has been considered as a suitable alternative for portland cement in self-consolidating lightweight concrete (SCLWC) mixtures. However, certain inconsistencies were reported in terms of strength development and durability properties of the PLC concrete. In addition, fresh SCLWC mixtures are more likely to encounter t...

Road construction and maintenance are both important consumers of natural resources and energy. The two main pavement types used today, in the province of Quebec, is asphalt and cement concrete pavement. This branch of the construction industry has a significant impact on the environment and, therefore, it could be of interest to find out which of...

An extensive growth in pavement life cycle assessment studies is noticed in recent years. Current literature in pavement life cycle assessment demonstrates a wide range of implications on environmental burdens associated with the pavements. However, immature parts still remain, needing further research, in the next years, in different stages of pav...

Use of pozzolanic materials such as natural zeolite as portland cement replacement helps to reduce amount of CO2 emission due to clinker production. Natural zeolite also improves mechanical and durability properties of concrete. It is common to use natural zeolite as a rheological modifying admixture in flowing concrete. However, many cases were re...

In this paper, the effects of three superplasticizers, namely, poly-carboxylate ether, calcium ligno-sulfonate, and Naphthalene Sulfonate Formaldehyde, on the workability retention of NZ blended mortars were investigated. In addition, simultaneous inclusion of either tripolyphosphate type retarder or Na2SO4 admixtures was examined as a measure to m...

Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag (GGBFS) is widely used as an effective partial cement replacement material. GGBFS inclusion has already been proven to improve several performance characteristics of concrete. GGBFS provides enhanced durability, including high resistance to chloride penetration and protection against alkali silica reaction. In t...

One of the most expensive component of concrete is a chemical additives used in the construction industry. Water reducing admixtures as one of the chemical additives used in the construction industry. Use of zeolite as a natural pozzolan in concrete due to the unique physical properties require larger amounts of water reducing admixtures in order t...