Sustainable Road Infrastructure: Technologies and Assessments

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Highways consume a significant amount of electrical energy annually, especially in remote desert regions where the cost of electricity is high. This research explores the utilization of natural resources along desert highways to establish hybrid energy generation systems for service areas. Three service areas along the desert highway in northern Xinjiang, China, serve as case studies. To assess the feasibility of hybrid energy generation systems in these service areas, meteorological data for the three locations were obtained from the NASA platform. The HOMER Pro software was employed for technical, economic, and environmental analyses of the systems. The results indicate the feasibility of Photovoltaic (PV)/Wind/Battery hybrid energy systems in the Huanghuagou, Kelameili, and Wujiaqu service areas. The application of these hybrid energy generation systems across the three service areas could provide 3,349,557 kWh of electrical energy annually for the desert highway. Sensitivity analysis reveals that the Net Present Cost (NPC) and Cost of Energy (COE) values decrease with increasing radiation levels, while NPC shows an increasing trend with growing load demand, and COE exhibits a decreasing trend. Among the three regions, Wujiaqu demonstrates the highest economic viability, with a COE of $0.34/kWh and an NPC of $3,141,641/kWh. Furthermore, Wujiaqu exhibits the lowest environmental impact, with CO2 emissions of 198,387 kg/yr, SO2 emissions of 493 kg/yr, and NOx emissions of 1,711 kg/yr.

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Original Research
25 January 2024
Comprehensive analysis of renewable hybrid energy systems in highway tunnels
Zhen Liao
5 more and 
Hao Cao
Power generation curve for each renewable hybrid energy system.

In order to explore the feasibility of a renewable hybrid energy system in highway tunnels, a scenario-coupled construction method for a highway tunnel renewable hybrid energy system is proposed. Based on this method, a tunnel on a highway in southern China serves as an example, and a renewable hybrid energy system for the highway tunnel is constructed. Using HOMER, the hybrid energy system is simulated, optimized, and analyzed, studying the characteristics of the operation of the highway tunnel hybrid renewable energy system in an off-grid mode. The optimal configuration for the hybrid energy system is proposed. The research results indicate the feasibility of constructing a highway tunnel renewable hybrid energy system by utilizing natural resources within the road area (solar energy, wind energy). The hybrid renewable energy system for this tunnel can provide 1112392 kWh of electrical energy annually, with the lowest energy cost being $0.17/kW. Furthermore, the hybrid energy system can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to the sustainable development of the environment.

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Original Research
30 November 2023

Because of the fast deterioration speed of the surface function of conventional asphalt pavement, thin overlayer with many advantages has been applied to the pavement surface. However, due to problems such as insufficient stripping resistance and cracking resistance, the performance of the thin overlayer needs to be further improved. To achieve this target, basalt fiber was introduced into two types of thin overlayer asphalt mixtures (Open graded friction course, OGFC-5, and Stone matrix asphalt mixture, SMA-5). The wheel tracking test and uniaxial penetration test for high temperature deformation resistance, low temperature bending beam test and indirect tensile asphalt (IDEAL) cracking test for cracking resistance, cantabro test for stripping resistance, and friction coefficient test for skid resistance were conducted to evaluate various performance of thin overlayer asphalt mixtures, along with the dynamic modulus test for dynamic mechanical response. The results showed that adding basalt fiber could enhance the high temperature deformation resistance, low temperature cracking resistance, intermediate temperature cracking resistance and stripping resistance of the thin overlayer, while having no significant impact on skid resistance. Furthermore, adding basalt fiber could increase the modulus in the high temperature region and decrease the modulus in the low temperature region of the thin overlayer asphalt mixtures, indicating thin overlayer with basalt fiber presenting superior both high temperature and low temperature performance. In addition, the evaluation indexes of SLT and SHT proposed from dynamic modulus test exhibited good consistency with the results of the performance tests.

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3 citations
Original Research
28 November 2023
Research on the influence factors of accident severity of new energy vehicles based on ensemble learning
Zixuan Zhang
3 more and 
Shaofeng Sun
Summary diagram of road and environmental factors in overall accidents involving new energy vehicles.

With the deepening of the concept of green, low-carbon, and sustainable development, the continuous growth of the ownership of new energy vehicles has led to increasing public concerns about the traffic safety issues of these vehicles. In order to conduct research on the traffic safety of new energy vehicles, three sampling methods, namely, Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE), Edited Nearest Neighbours (ENN), and SMOTE-ENN hybrid sampling, were employed, along with cost-sensitive learning, to address the problem of imbalanced data in the UK road traffic accident dataset. Three algorithms, eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), and Categorical Boosting (CatBoost), were selected for modeling work. Lastly, the evaluation criteria used for model selection were primarily based on G-mean, with AUC and accuracy as secondary measures. The TreeSHAP method was applied to explain the interaction mechanism between accident severity and its influencing factors in the constructed models. The results showed that LightGBM had a more stable overall performance and higher computational efficiency. XGBoost demonstrated a balanced combination of computational efficiency and model performance. CatBoost, however, was more time-consuming and showed less stability with different datasets. Studies have found that people using fewer protective means of transportation (bicycles, motorcycles) and vulnerable groups such as pedestrians are susceptible to serious injury and death.

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Frontiers Logo

Frontiers in Energy Research

Planning and Operation of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems, Volume III
Edited by Weihao Hu, Haoran Zhao, Yuefang Du, Di Cao, Sayed Abulanwar
Deadline
30 June 2025
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