Copyrighted Materials opp 213 Taper Faris Reeves tor ween 1 Introduction and Description of Pavements 1.1 IMPORTANCE Pavements are an essential part of our life. We use them as roads, runways, parking lots, and driveways. Pavements are engineered structures and are important for our everyday life, commerce and trade, and defense. Surface transportation is the most widely used mode of transportation in the world, and a country’s development is often measured in terms of its total paved road mileage. The construction of roads is and will continue to be a major industry in developing countries, and as, the infrastructure matures, it will be a major industry in developed countries as well. Like any other engineered structure, pavements are expected to be adequately strong and durable for their design life. They are expected to function properly by providing a smooth traveling surface for the traffic under various conditions of the environment. In order to ensure this, pavements must bbe designed, constructed, maintained, and managed properly. Pavements can be broadly classified into asphalt (or flexible) and concrete (or rigid) pave~ ments (Figure 1.1). Pavements consist of different layers, more so in the case of asphalt pave- ‘ments than concrete ones. From the bottom up, these layers are known as the subgrade, subbase, bbase, and binder and/or surface. There are certain pavements with asphalt surface layers on top of concrete layers. Inthe United States, there are about 4 million miles of roads, of which approximately 2.5 million are paved. The federal government and state departments of transportation (DOTS) spend a signifi- cant portion of their budget on maintaining and managing existing pavements and rehabilitating old pavements, More than 90% of commodities are transported on highways in the United States. Roads in poor condition end up costing the DOTS a lot of money for repairs, as well as to the users for repairing damaged vehicles. These roads are also unsafe for travel—for example, more than 30% of traffic fatalities in the state of Massachusetts in the United States have been reported to be due to poor road conditions. 1.2. FUNCTIONS The most important function of the pavement is to withstand the load applied from a vehicle such as a truck or an aircraft, without deforming excessively. The layered structure of the pavement is ‘meant for ensuring that the load is spread out below the tire, such that the resultant stress at the bot- tom layer of the pavement, the subgrade, is low enough not to cause damage. The most significant load applied to a pavement surface comes from a truck or an aircraft tire, The approach in a flexible ‘pavement is to spread the load in such a way that the stress at the subgrade soil level is small enough so that it can sustain the stress without any major deformation. When the existing soil is not stiff enough to support the relatively small stress, then there is a need to improve the soil. There is also a need to improve the soil if itis susceptible to moisture. Such a problem can be solved by treating the soil with an additive, such as lime and a Portland cement ‘Since pavements are exposed to the environment, a very important factor in the design of pave- iments is the consideration of water, which could be coming from rain/snow (surface water) and/or from the ground (ground/subsurface water). Since water can be detrimental to a pavement, a basic necessity of designing a proper pavement is to provide adequate drainage for both surface and2 Pavement Engineering: Principles and Practice FIGURE 1.1. (@) Example of asphalt pavement. (Courtesy of Mike Marshall, Wirtgen, GmbH, Windhagen, Germany) (b) Example of concrete pavement, (Courtesy of Wouter Gulden, ACPA, SE Chapter, Duluth, GA) subsurface water. Standing water on a pavement can cause hydroplaning, skidding, and accidents. There is a need to make sure that water from precipitation is drained away quickly and effectively and that there is no depression on the roads to collect water. Water present in frost-susceptible soils in the subgrade can freeze, causing heaving and failure of the pavement. Therefore, frost-susceptible materials should be avoided. If this is not possible, then the pavement structure above the sub- grade should be thick enough to prevent the freezing front from reaching the frost-susceptible soil. Similarly, as one expects some water to make its way through random cracks and joints, proper sub- surface drainage must be provided, and the material within the pavement structure should be made resistant to the actions of water—otherwise the aggregates, for example, would be washed away due (o repeated traffic-induced pressure or freeze-thaw pressures. In most cases, itis not possible to completely avoid water flowing inside a pavement, Such ingress of water can physically remove materials from inside a pavement structure and also freeze and cause deformations in the pavement. To prevent this, the pavement material must be selected properly and, if needed, modified. 1.3. DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION Generally the layers in a pavement improve in quality as one goes up from the bottom to the surface layer. The surface layer, which can be asphalt or concrete, is the most expensive and stifiturable layer in the entire pavement structure. Components of this layer are mostly naturally occurring materials, for example, asphalt binder is a by-product of the petroleum distillation process and aggregates are obtained from rock quarries or riverbeds. These materials are combined and used in different proportions to produce the final material that is used in the pavement. For example, asphalt binder is mixed with aggregates to produce hot mix asphalt (HMA) for asphalt pavements, while Portland cement is mixed with aggregates in Portland cement concrete (PCC) pavements. In both cases, the mixing must be conducted in the correct proportions to ensure adequate quality of the mixture. It is important to find out whether the resultant mix has the adequate strength and stiff ness through testing. Such esting is generally conducted in the laboratory during the mix design process, During this process, loading and effect of environmental conditions can be sinvulated in the laboratory. If the responses to this testing do not meet our expectations, then the mix needs to be redesigned and/or the materials need to be reselected. These “expectations” are specifications that hhave been developed on the basis of experience and research. State DOTs or agencies can use their own specifications and/or use specifications from organizations such as the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) or the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Similarly, testing is also conducted according to standards, which again can be from stateIntroduction and Description of Pavements 3 DOTS or the AASHTO. Whether or not the material can be placed and compacted is also deter- mined during the mix design process. In most cases, pavement engineers are restricted to using locally available materials, with or without some modifications, because of economic and practical reasons. With these available mate- rials itis important to determine what thickness of each layer, and hence the entire pavement, is required to carry the loads under different environmental conditions without any problem. This, step, known as the structural design, makes sure that the pavement structure as a whole can with- stand traffic for its design life, even though the traffic might increase and the properties of the layer might change cyclically and/or progressively during its design life. Generally several layers are present in an asphalt pavement. From the bottom up, the layers are Known as the subgrade, subbase, base, and binder and/or surface. Generally, the bottommost layer is soil; the subbase and/or base layers can be granular soil, or aggregates or asphalt-aggregate mix- tures (mixes); and the binder and surface are asphalt mixes. While designing, adequate thickness to each layer is assigned, so as to obtain the desirable properties in the most cost-effective way. Concrete pavements may not have as many layers, and in many cases the concrete slab rests on a stabilized subgrade, which consists of soils modified with some additives. ‘Once the pavement materials/mix and structure are designed, it must be constructed properly. To ensure this, the material must be laid down and cured (if needed) and compacted in the proper way so that it has the desirable qualities, such as density and/or stiffness. While selecting the materials and designing the mix and the structure, itis important to keep workability in consideration, since the best-designed mix would be worthless if it cannot be constructed properly. Furthermore, quality control must be carried out during construction to ensure strict adherence to specification and hence uniformly good quality over the entire project duration. 1.4 MAINTENANCE AND REHABILITATION Starting from day one after construction, a pavement starts deteriorating in quality. Even though a properly designed and constructed pavement will not deteriorate so as to cause total failure within its design life, if no maintenance is performed, the entire pavement will become totally worthless at the end of its design life, Furthermore, ingress of water through random openings such as surface cracks, and well-defined openings such as joints, can lead to quick deterioration of the quality of the pavement. The best approach is to regularly perform maintenance operations, similar to any engi- neered structure or product, through actions such as joint filling, crack repair or filling, or pothole patching. Note that these operations do not specifically increase the design life but do prevent its rapid deterioration. For pavements such as those on highways and airport runways, proper maint nance is critical for the safety of the vehicles and their occupants. In most cases, once built, a pavement can be “recycled” at the end of its design life almost infinite times, by reusing the existing materials solely or in combination with new materials. Off-course rehabilitation of pavements is a costly process. Hence, for any pavement network, a proper inventory of the condition of different pavements must be kept and utilized effectively to determine the time/ order in which the different pavement sections should be rehabilitated. This is important because of two reasons. First, there is never enough funding for rehabilitation of all of the roads in a network at the same time, and secondly, different roads deteriorate at different rates and hence are in different conditions ata specific time. It is important to “catch” the pavement at the most “appropriate” condi- tion such that the rehabilitation can be done economically—a totally damaged pavement will need too much money to rehabilitate/replace it. This process of keeping an inventory of condition and selecting pavements for rehabilitation/reconstruction is called pavement management. This step Includes the use of tools for determining the condition of existing pavements. The fastest growing method of such detection is nondestructive testing and evaluation (NDT and NDE). One example of widely used form of NDT is the falling weight deflectometer (FWD) that works on the principle of