Randolph Kirchain

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Group Leader at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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,...

Each year, state DOTs make decisions about which paving jobs to let, and whether they should be designed as concrete, asphalt, or let as alternates. There is wide variation in the amount spent on concrete pavement and asphalt pavement across the states and over time. Asphalt and concrete pavement materials can be considered substitutes because they...

There is a growing interest in developing cool pavement strategies to mitigate pavement’s impact on the global warming in recent years. One of the mitigation strategies is by increasing the solar reflectance (or albedo) of the pavement surface, which directly contributes to global cooling by adjusting radiative forcing and potentially reduces the e...

Departments of transportation (DOTs) are increasingly utilizing pavement management systems for the efficient maintenance and preservation of the existing roadway system. Few studies to date, however, have considered sources of variation beyond pavement deterioration nor the implication of investing in multiple pavement materials. The goal of this...

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...

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....

A roadblock to long-term growth of the photonics industry is the availability of well-trained, adaptable middle-skilled workers. This research characterizes the middle-skilled workforce gap, including the quantity required and skills needed. We estimate that 42,000 new technical middle-skilled workers are needed by 2030, requiring another 100 techn...

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...

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....

Raw materials costs form an increasingly significant proportion of the total costs of renewable energy technologies that must be adopted at unprecedented rates to combat climate change. As the affordable deployment of these technologies grows vulnerable to materials price changes, effective strategies must be identified to mitigate the risk of high...

Predictions of metal consumption are vital for criticality assessments and sustainability analyses. Although demand for a material varies strongly by region and end‐use sector, statistical models of demand typically predict demand using regression analyses at an aggregated global level (“fully pooled models”). “Un‐pooled” regression models that pre...

In this study, the impacts of various mitigation strategies for existing and newly constructed buildings in the United States on embodied and operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were quantified until 2050. A bottom-up approach was utilized to model the characteristics of individual reference buildings. First, reference designs and practices...

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...

Exploring how businesses can adopt eco-innovations, which may involve their market expansion, and meet their climate change targets, was the objective of this research. We investigated to what extent an organization with a milk packaging eco-innovation could create a positive impact on climate and calculated their potential carbon handprint using t...

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...

The European Union (EU-27) targets buildings' decarbonization by 2050, and prefabrication presents an opportunity to reduce buildings and construction sector impacts. A stock-based approach was developed to measure the influence of wide adoption of building prefabrication in the EU-27 building stock from 2020 to 2050. Impacts and costs of five typo...

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...

With only 8.4% of end-of-life plastics collected for recycling in 2017, management of postconsumer plastic waste in the U.S. has raised significant concerns. We present an integrated approach to assess the environmental benefits and economic implications of plastic waste management by interfacing collection and sorting with process-based treatment...

Purpose The Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise (SHINE) project is dedicated to improving the scientific basis for transformative environmental, social, and economic positive changes called handprints. Organizations and individuals can create handprints relative to their business-as-usual (BAU) through voluntary reductio...

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 prediction of pavement deterioration is a key element for performance-based planning. One characteristic for the pavement management system data that are used for deterioration prediction is that they are in the time-series form. However, most existing models assume the pavement deterioration satisfies a Markovian assumption and ignores histori...

Performance-based planning is an important tool for allocating treatment resources across a pavement network. The process involves the selection of a treatment action for each segment in a pavement network from a set of candidate treatments and then optimizing the allocation of funds across the network in accordance with a budget constraint. This p...

A novel weighted multi-output neural network (NN) model is proposed for predicting the deterioration of rigid pavements based on Iowa pavement management system data. This first-of-a-kind model simultaneously predicts four pavement condition metrics concerning rigid pavements, including IRI, faulting, longitudinal crack and transverse crack. It pro...

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...

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...

A novel weighted multi-output neural network (NN) model is proposed for predicting the deterioration of rigid pavements based on Iowa pavement management system data. This first-of-a-kind model simultaneously predicts four pavement condition metrics concerning rigid pavements, including IRI, faulting, longitudinal crack and transverse crack. It pro...

Demand for battery electric vehicles (BEVs) has grown over the past decade as a result of climate action targets and energy policies globally. To improve driving range and minimize battery costs, BEV manufacturers have adopted lightweight materials with the objective of reducing energy requirements and enabling the use of smaller, less expensive ba...

Planning agencies are searching for innovative techniques to cost effectively preserve their existing infrastructure systems. In this study, we investigate the effects of two indicators of increased competition in the paving market as a mechanism to reduce roadway construction costs. The highway construction sector makes for a unique case study due...

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...

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...

Lithium-ion battery demand, particularly for electric vehicles, is projected to increase by over 300% throughout the next decade. With these expected increases in demand, cobalt (Co)-dependent technologies face the risk of significant impact from supply concentration and mining limitations in the short term. Increased extraction and secondary recov...

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...

High-albedo materials reflect more solar radiation and, thereby, alter the earth’s radiative balance. Increasing pavement albedo, therefore, has been considered as a technological strategy to mitigate global warming. Previous studies have evaluated the general potential of increasing pavement albedo using global-average models. To factor this effec...

This paper proposes a new probabilistic treatment path dependence (PTPD) model for budget allocation within pavement network management problems. During the evaluation of treatment alternatives for a segment in a pavement network, the model considers benefits of both the evaluated treatment and its following actions. It also incorporates the influe...

Pavement-management systems are important tools that planning agencies depend on to cost-effectively maintain their roadway systems. The incorporation of uncertainty (beyond that related to pavement degradation) within these systems is limited, causing decision-makers to be unable to (a) recognize the risk of their status quo maintenance policy and...

Electrification and lightweighting technologies are important components of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction strategies for light-duty vehicles. Assessments of GHG emissions from light-duty vehicles should take a cradle-to-grave lifecycle perspective and capture important regional effects. We report the first regionally explicit (county-leve...

In 2009, the U.S. cement and concrete industries established the Concrete Sustainability Hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A primary thrust of MIT’s activities has been improving the life cycle assessment practices to better quantify the environmental impacts over the life of a pavement. In their research, the MIT CSHub determined t...

In 2009, the United States cement and concrete industries established the Concrete Sustainability Hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop more sustainable and durable pavement infrastructure and buildings. With respect to pavements, two areas of focus have been on how the economic practices used in the pavement type selection pr...

2019 American Society of Civil Engineers. In 2009, the U.S. cement and concrete industries established the Concrete Sustainability Hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A primary thrust of MIT's activities has been improving the life cycle assessment practices to better quantify the environmental impacts over the life of a pavement. In...

As the threat of climate change grows, lowering the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of high emitting sectors of the economy has become critical. The buildings sector is particularly significant, consuming up to 40% of total global energy demand. To lower the associated emissions and meet GHG reduction targets, stakeholders must consider both the ene...

Concrete is the most widely used engineered material in the world with more than 10 billion tons produced annually. Unfortunately, with that scale comes a significant burden in terms of energy, water, and release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. As such, there is interest in creating concrete formulas that minimize this environmental burde...

While many pavement life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have been performed over the last decade, one of the most important advances and challenges is quantifying the impacts of various components during the use phase of pavements. The goal of this research is to understand the role of the use phase, particularly pavement-vehicle interaction (PVI),...

Life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) is a way to evaluate the long-term cost effectiveness of different pavement designs or treatment actions. Owing to the existence of uncertainties, many probabilistic LCCA models have been proposed. They mainly use a prescribed treatment schedule or determine schedules by mechanistic-empirical analysis, potentially le...

Decision-makers in government and industry must develop policy and strategy for highly complex systems, trading off competing objectives such as environmental and economic impact. These trade-offs can be difficult to analyze, which may lead to misinformed choices. There is lack of decision support tools that both include multiple objectives and fac...

The use of low-cost feedstocks such as waste cooking oils has gained prominence in biodiesel production due to its potential economic and environmental advantages. Since these feedstocks are derived from multiple sources, its compositional variability has led to quality concerns that may significantly limit its utilization. One potential strategy t...

Every sector faces unique challenges in the transition to sustainability. Across each, materials will play a key role. That will depend on novel materials and processes, but these will only be effective with a solid understanding of the trends in the market. For each respective sector, the papers in this collection will explore the trends and drive...

Several authors have suggested that supplies for key non-renewable resources may soon cease to expand at the same rate as demand. Inevitably this would lead to some peak and then decline in production. This work describes the development and application of a fully dynamic model of the copper market. This model includes both a probabilistic simulato...

Understanding cobalt criticality and availability is necessary as lithium-ion battery demand, particularly for electric vehicles, is projected to increase exponentially throughout the next decade. With these increases in demand, supply concentration and mining limitations could have a significant impact on cobalt-dependent firms, sectors, and emerg...

Planning agencies increasingly use pavement management systems (PMS) to determine an optimal preservation strategy for their roadway assets. To develop cost-effective resource allocation policies, it is important that a PMS embed pavement degradation models that accurately depict its progression over time. Presently, PMS frameworks use two broad cl...

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 2017 Infrastructure Report Card, the backlog for repair of existing highways across the U.S. totals approximately $420 million. With funding at all-time lows, it is important that agencies select maintenance, rehabilitation & reconstruction (MRR) activities through use of efficient budget...

Two obstacles that impede wider use of life cycle assessment (LCA) are its time- and data-intensiveness and the credibility surrounding its results—challenges that grow with the complexity of the product being analyzed. To guide the critical early-design stages of a complicated product like a building, it is important to be able to rapidly estimate...

High-pressure die-casting (HPDC) is a proven manufacturing technology to cast aluminum and magnesium alloys. Transportation industries are under increased pressure to reduce the mass of cast parts in order to cut fuel use and CO2 emissions, and increase load. Reducing mass and improving mechanical properties with current HPDC is not practical due t...

Albedo is the measure of the ratio of solar radiation reflected by the Earth’s surface. High-albedo reflective surfaces absorb less energy and reflect more shortwave radiation. The change in radiative energy balance at the top-of-atmosphere (TOA), which is called radiative forcing (RF), reduces nearby air temperatures and influences the surrounding...

To aid the design of buildings with lower environmental impacts, it is important to be able to rapidly compare the predicted impacts and costs of design alternatives at early stages of the design process when many influential decisions are made. At the same time, it is also important to preserve design flexibility in order to better accommodate div...

Recycling is a key strategy to reduce the environmental impact associated with industrial resource use. Recent improvements in materials recovery technologies offer the possibility for recouping additional value from recycling. However, incorporation of secondary raw materials into production may be constrained by operational complexity in two-stag...

Life cycle assessments (LCAs) provide valuable guidance regarding environmental implications of design and manufacturing choice; however, they remain resource intensive and time consuming. Streamlining approaches have been developed to address these issues. One of these streamlining approaches, structured under-specification and probabilistic triag...

In 2009, the United States cement and concrete industries established the Concrete Sustainability Hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop more sustainable and durable pavement infrastructure and buildings. With respect to pavements, one area of focus has been on improving the economic procedures related to pavement type selectio...

Imagine a household sponge lying next to a kitchen sink. The sponge looks and feels different when it is wet versus when it is dry. When a sponge dries, it shrinks, curls and hardens due to suction forces (called “capillary stress”) which change its mechanical properties. Although the material compositions are different, the same mechanism occurs i...

Different models have been developed to quantify the energy dissipation in pavements due to pavement–vehicle interaction (PVI). The present study focuses on a mechanistic model for estimating deflection-induced excess fuel consumption (EFC). Due to the non-linearity of the models, the calculated dissipation is dependent on the resolution and accura...

Decisions made at early stages of the building design process can have a large influence on the environmental performance and financial costs of a building. One of the best ways to discover preferable designs is to analyze and compare many different alternatives. However, due to time and data requirements, assessments of a building’s environmental...

The existence of uncertainties and variations in data represents a remaining challenge for life cycle assessment (LCA). Moreover, a full analysis may be complex, time-consuming, and implemented mainly when a product design is already defined. Structured under-specification, a method developed to streamline LCA, is here proposed to support the resid...

Life cycle thinking plays an important role in sustainable development in the building sector. However, the complexity of data collection and scope definition limits life cycle assessment (LCA) applications. Even if the inventory data have already been collected, tabulated, and indexed, the method is still time-consuming, which may be discouraging...

Even though it is in society's interest to mitigate hazard damage, investments in hazard resilience are often not made, in part due to uncertainty around the potential costs and their benefits. The goal of this paper is to introduce a new resilience metric for buildings that captures the maximum investment that can be made in hazard mitigation whil...

A pavement management system is a useful tool for departments of transportation to address the problems of limited budget and aging infrastructures. Previous research focuses mainly on the budget allocation process, trying to improve the optimization algorithms and consider the uncertainty of predictions for pavement deterioration. In any given pav...

Building retrofits are often motivated by the desire to improve the energy efficiency of a building. However, environmental burdens associated with additional materials used to accomplish energy efficiency are not usually taken into account. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) and life-cycle cost assessment (LCCA) approaches have been extensively applied t...

Albedo is the measure of how much solar energy is reflected by the Earth’s surface. Lighter color, or high-albedo, surfaces absorb less sunlight energy and reflect more shortwave radiation. Increasing pavement albedo has been considered as a technological strategy to mitigate impacts of climate change through a mechanism known as radiative forcing....

A comprehensive component-level assessment of several strategic and minor metals (SaMMs) including copper, manganese, magnesium, nickel, tin, niobium, light rare earth elements (lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, and samarium), cobalt, silver, tungsten, heavy rare earth elements (yttrium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosi...

As project planners continue to move towards frameworks such as probabilistic life-cycle cost analysis to evaluate competing transportation investments, there is a need to enhance the current cost-estimation approaches that underlie these models to enable improved project selection. This paper presents an approach for cost estimation that combines...

Concerns about the planet's health call for a careful evaluation of the environmental impact of materials choices. Life-cycle assessment is a tool that can help identify sustainable materials pathways by considering the burdens of materials both during production and as a product.

Cost-quality trade-offs are required when manufacturing industries seek to minimize cost and maximize product quality or reliability. We report a challenging cost-quality tradeoff problem for a consumer goods industry where both cost and quality are modeled together. First we present a 10-step systems engineering methodology for quality improvement...

Albedo is the measure of the fraction of solar energy reflected by the Earth’s surface. High-albedo surfaces, which are lighter in color, absorb less sunlight energy and reflect more shortwave radiation. The change in radiative energy balance, which is called radiative forcing (RF), reduces nearby air temperatures and impacts the surrounding buildi...

Biodiesel is globally produced by transesterification of vegetable oils. Each vegetable oil possesses a typical fatty acid (FA) profile that will influence the final properties of the biodiesel. Models have been developed to express the relationship between the FA composition and the fuel properties. However, as the FA sources are variable and beca...

Biodiesel is globally produced by transesterification of vegetable oils. Each vegetable oil possesses a typical fatty acid (FA) profile that will influence the final properties of the biodiesel. Models have been developed to express the relationship between the FA composition and the fuel properties. However, as the FA sources are variable and beca...

Life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) is a commonly used approach by pavement engineers to compare the economic efficiency of alternative pavement design and maintenance strategies. Over the past two decades, the pavement community has augmented the LCCA framework used in practice by explicitly accounting for uncertainty in the decision-making process an...

Increased use of secondary raw materials in metal production offers several benefits including reduced cost and lowered energy burden. The lower cost of secondary or scrap materials is accompanied by an increased uncertainty in elemental composition. This increased uncertainty for different scraps, if not managed well, results in an increased risk...

In order to reduce the energy consumption of a proposed building, it is valuable to be able to estimate the energy consumption at early stages of the design process when influential attributes are being decided upon. We present a novel use of a regression-based energy metamodel to guide the early design of single-family residential buildings by pro...

Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) is an economic procedure often used to compare competing pavement designs. For the LCCA to be meaningful and reliable, the analysis must reflect the most likely activities for each alternative being evaluated. Currently, most state highway agencies (SHA) apply a standard, policy-set, rehabilitation schedule to all pa...

Practitioners increasingly use pavement management systems for determining the allocation of resources for multidecade investments. One important and uncertain input that will affect decisions in these frameworks is future changes in cost for rehabilitation and reconstruction actions. Despite this, existing paradigms overlook its consideration larg...

Platinum group metals (PGMs) are technological and economic enablers of many industrial processes. This important role, coupled with their limited geographic availability has led to PGMs being labeled as "critical materials". Studies of future PGM flows have focused on trends within material flows or macroeconomic indicators. We complement the prev...

We propose a methodology for conducting robust comparative life cycle assessments (LCA) by leveraging uncertainty. The method evaluates a broad range of the possible scenario space in a probabilistic fashion while simultaneously considering uncertainty in input data. The method is intended to ascertain which scenarios have a definitive environmenta...

This paper describes the scope, methods, data, and results of a comprehensive quantitative analysis of generation, stock, and collection of used computers and monitors in the United States , specifically desktops, laptops, CRT monitors, and flat panel monitors in the decade leading up to 2010. Generation refers to used electronics coming directly o...

The evolution of the Photonics Systems Manufacturing Consortium (PSMC) and its activities and tentative results are discussed. The PSMC evolved from the long standing optical electronic roadmap activities of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Micro Photonics Center Communications Technology Roadmap (MIT MPC CTR) and the international Network...