With the increase in traffic loading and repetitions, agencies are requiring longer design lives for their new pavement designs. The Illinois Department of Transportation is interested in designing and constructing extended-life concrete pavements with 40-year service lives. This study will design, instrument, and construct continuously reinforced concrete pavement sections at the Advanced Transportation Research and Engineering Laboratory in Rantoul , Illinois . These sections will allow for monitoring and analyzing of early age cracking in continuously reinforced concrete pavement (CRCP). A new accelerated transportation loading assembly (ATLAS), which can simulate 40 years of traffic in several months will load and fail the test sections.

The full scale testing data will allow for better understanding of the failure of CRCP sections and for extrapolation to new, extended-life CRCP sections on highway systems in Illinois .