The concept of perpetual pavements has been well documented in Europe and North America for several years. This paper presents an experiment to design and construct perpetual pavement sections to carry very heavy loads with a design single axle of 19 tonnes. The main objective is to construct pavement sections designed using different methods, to measure their response and predict performance. The experiment has three objectives: 1. Evaluate structural design methods. 2. Evaluate asphalt mix properties to carry heavy loads. 3. Characterize traffic loads being applied to the pavement. Five pavement sections were built on a new motorway in Shandong Province, China. One section was designed using a tensile strain at the bottom of the pavement of 70 microstrain under the design load. Another was designed using the same principle except 125 microstrain was used as the limiting strain. A third section also used 125 microstrain but was constructed with mixtures that are more strain tolerant. Two composite sections were built with stabilized soil and aggregate layers under hot mix asphalt. All sections contain embedded instrumentation to evaluate pavement response under known loads. A weigh-in-motion scale will categorize the number and types of trucks as well as the axle loads to which the pavement is being subjected. This paper presents the design and construction of the experiment and the measured response of the pavements to known loads. A methodology is also presented to estimate the expected life of the pavement sections.
Perpetual Pavements: Applying the Approach to Very Heavy Loads
Seventh International Conference of Chinese Transportation Professionals Congress (ICCTP) ; 2007 ; Shanghai, China
2008-03-21
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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