A STUDY ON FLEXIBLE PAVEMENT WITH REINFORCED BITUMINOUS LAYERS

Abstract

Good communication facilities are inevitable for economic prosperity and social welfare of any country. These include good quality roads. Modern day vehicular traffic consists of fast moving vehicles with heavy axle loads. Hence good roads should perform well under such traffic even for sites with poor soils. The construction of roads on poor soils demands higher thickness of pavement and additional amount of road materials, slowing down the pace of work and creating construction problems. Reinforcing the pavements using geogrids appears to be giving promising solutions in this regard. The present study was aimed to compare the behaviour of Unreinforced and geogrid reinforced pavements under identical loading conditions. Pressure cells were used to measure stresses in the pavement at various locations below the loaded area. The vehicular loads were represented by a circular plate of 304.8mm diameter. Cyclic and repetitive plate load tests were carried out and stresses and settlements were measured. Based on the results obtained, it was observed that the settlements in reinforced pavements were less compared to Unreinforced pavements. The stress reductions were in the range of 40 to 50 percentage in the case of reinforced pavements when compared to unreinforced pavements. Hence reinforced flexible pavements are very effective and have the potential to revolutionise the road construction in the near future.