ABSTRACT
Chinese highway maintenance technologies were researched from the perspective of energy consumption. The boundary of maintenance life cycle was defined as follow: minerals extraction as the beginning and the reopening to traffic as the end. The energy consumptions of highway maintenance were studied with the application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which was divided into 4 stages: raw materials production, mixture production, on-site construction and materials transport. This paper put emphasis on researching calculation model of mixture production and on-site construction associated with Chinese highway maintenance. The Energy Consumption Index of Maintenance (ECIM) was put forward in accordance with Chinese standards GB/T 2589–2008. Different kinds of Chinese maintenance technologies were calculated with the model and the results were compared with European achievement. It shows that the ECIM disparity between Chinese maintenance technologies and European ones is within 4% on condition that subjective factors are left out.
