Development of two lift concrete pavement with different concretes

Abstract

ABSTRACT newlineThe thesis presents the development of two-lift concrete pavement using a range of innovative concretes, including Roller Compacted Concrete (RCC), Geopolymer Concrete (GPC), Ultra-High Performance Fiber Reinforced Concrete (UHPFRC), and Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC). The concept of two-lift concrete pavements has emerged as a transformative approach to achieving sustainable, durable, and cost-effective infrastructure. Though it came into existence in the early twentieth century but it did not gain importance as the priority was to use simple techniques for constructing pavements rather than complex ones, no matter the cost involved. So, the techniques like design of plain jointed concrete pavements, reinforced jointed concrete pavement, continuously reinforced concrete pavements which used single lift as the pavement top came into custom. However, the increasing demand for maintaining the rigid pavements effectively has time and again emphasized the researchers to find solutions for this problem. To maintain the already constructed slab, self-compacting concrete has been proposed as it easily makes contact with old concrete and fills in the cracks also, but filling the cracks is never so efficient. The motivation to solve this problem has led this research to use two lift pavement, so that the top life could be easily laid once it is deteriorated. This also facilitates using low cost shrinkage resistant concretes having lesser fatigue strength and wear resistance to be used in the bottom lift. To avoid bottom upwards or top downwards cracking an appreciable thickness of both lifts had to be taken. Therefore, a bottom lift which constitutes two-third of the total pavement thickness was taken, while the top lift forms the remaining one-third. The bottom lift is typically composed of lower-cost or recycled materials like RCC or GPC, while the top lift incorporates high-performance materials such as UHPFRC or ECC to ensure superior surface properties like smoothness, skid resistance, and durabili