Optimizing roads for sustainability: Inverted pavement design with life cycle cost analysis and carbon footprint estimation

Inverted pavements have proven performance across the world, and there is a need to optimize the layer thickness and material properties of the pavement addressing the critical failures in the mechanistic-empirical pavement design. The present study is made on bituminous concrete (BC) pavement with traffic up to 50 samples per second (MSA) and studying the critical factors affecting the pavement performance. The Minitab’s response surface methodology (RSM) − box behnken method, was used for the design of experiments which includes critical factors and responses obtained from ANSYS finite element modeling of the inverted pavement. The critical factors and responses are normally distributed and indicate a linear relationship with the least error. The composite desirability for minimum stress and strains in the pavement layers was found to be 0.89. The optimized pavement thickness and layer material properties were validated with two pavement field cross sections of different Indian national highways, and it is observed that the optimized cross-section is safe. Further, this research paper carried out life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) of inverted pavement with optimized pavement cross-section obtained including the carbon footprint during the vehicle operation phase. The study demonstrated the benefits of inverted pavement with reduced costs and carbon emissions. Thus, this approach paves the way towards sustainable and long-lasting pavements.