Abstract
Mass hauling operations play central roles in construction projects. They typically use many haulers that consume large amounts of energy and emit significant quantities of CO2. However, practical methods for estimating the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of such operations during the project planning stage are scarce, while most of the previous methods focus on construction stage or after the construction stages which limited the practical adoption of reduction strategy in the early planning phase. This paper presents a detailed model for estimating the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of mass haulers that integrates the mass hauling plan with a set of predictive equations. The mass hauling plan is generated using a planning program such as DynaRoad in conjunction with data on the productivity of selected haulers and the amount of material to be hauled during cutting, filling, borrowing, and disposal operations. This plan is then used as input for estimating the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the selected hauling fleet. The proposed model will help planners to assess the energy and environmental performance of mass hauling plans, and to select hauler and fleet configurations that will minimize these quantities. The model was applied in a case study, demonstrating that it can reliably predict energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and hauler productivity as functions of the hauling distance for individual haulers and entire hauling fleets.
Highlights
Road and highway construction are major undertakings that involve large-scale mass hauling operations
This paper proposes a model for predicting the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of mass haulers based on information available during the project planning phase, namely a hauler database and a bill of quantities for earthwork operations
The most important model outputs are the optimum haul distance, productivity rate, number of time, queue time, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions for the three hauler models considered in cycles, time, over queue time,distances fuel consumption based cycle m
Summary
Road and highway construction are major undertakings that involve large-scale mass hauling operations. Over the last ten years, advances in construction technology and practices have significantly reduced the amounts of energy used and emissions generated by construction machinery and equipment [4,5,6] This is largely due to the introduction of new regulations, for instance, the ones from United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that limited the permissible emissions. The quantities of fuel and energy used in road construction projects are largely determined by the construction machinery and equipment that is used and the way in which it is used [8]. Mass hauling operations in road construction projects involve heavy haulers, which generally consume large quantities of energy; fuel costs account for around 30%. The model’s output is used to estimate the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the chosen hauler fleet based on pre-determined hourly fuel consumption values for each hauler type included in the plan
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