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ATREL Researchers Test Thin Concrete Pavements
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The Advanced Transportation Research and Engineering Laboratory (ATREL) is the site of cutting-edge research on a new design concept known as Thin Concrete Pavements (TCP). Comercial TCPavements Ltda, based in Santiago, Chile, is sponsoring this project to establish design guidelines for using TCP.
Concrete pavements are typically designed with minimum thicknesses of 6 in. for low volume roads and 8 to 12 in. for higher volume applications and with slab sizes of 12 ft. wide by 15 ft. long. Because larger slab sizes increase the curling and load stresses in concrete pavements, an alternative approach to minimizing concrete slab thickness is to reduce the slab panel size.
In mid-October, a research team led by Professor Jeff Roesler and Graduate Research Assistant Victor Cervantes supervised the construction of three consecutive test sections where the slab panel size was fixed at 6 ft. by 6 ft. The researchers will use these sections to study three primary variables: concrete thickness (8, 15, and 20 cm), concrete mixture (plain versus fiber-reinforced concrete), and base stiffness (aggregate base versus asphalt concrete base). The test sections were embedded with instruments to measure factors that affect curling (including temperature, deflections, and strain) and will be loaded with the Accelerated Transportation Loading ASsembly (ATLAS), which simulates the effects of real-life traffic. The researchers will use the test results to determine the optimal thickness for TCP at a given traffic level.
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