Determining Pavement Design Criteria for Recycled Aggregate Base and Large Stone Subbase

Project Details
STATUS

Completed

START DATE

11/27/17

END DATE

06/30/21

FOCUS AREAS

Infrastructure

RESEARCH CENTERS InTrans, PROSPER
SPONSORS

Minnesota Department of Transportation
National Road Research Alliance (NRRA) Transportation Pooled Fund

Researchers
Principal Investigator
Halil Ceylan

Director, PROSPER

Co-Principal Investigator
Ashley Buss
Co-Principal Investigator
Junxing Zheng

About the research

This project was performed to evaluate the performance of recycled aggregates and large stones used in the aggregate base/subbase layers of pavement systems and provide recommendations regarding pavement design and material selection.

As part of this project, 11 test cells were built at MnROAD to evaluate the impact of recycled aggregates and large stones on the long-term pavement performance via a series of laboratory [permeability, soil-water characteristic curve (SWCC), stereophotography (image analysis), gyratory compaction, and resilient modulus (MR) tests] and field tests [intelligent compaction (IC), falling weight deflectometer tests (FWD), rutting measurements, international roughness index (IRI) measurements, light weight deflectometer (LWD) tests, and dynamic cone penetrometer (DCP) tests]. In addition, a pavement mechanistic-empirical (ME) design approach was used to provide recommendations for designs of pavement systems containing recycled aggregate base (RAB) and large stone subbase (LSSB) layers.

Overall, this project found that finer recycled concrete aggregate (RCA) material would be preferable to coarser RCA material and a blend of RCA and recycled asphalt pavement (RAP) materials would be preferable to natural aggregate for aggregate base layers. RCA materials provided better performance than the blend of RCA and RAP materials, indicating that RCA materials would be preferable to the blend. For LSSB layers, this project found that geosynthetics would be required to successfully construct thinner LSSB layers. Overall, thicker LSSB layers provided better structural support than thinner LSSB layers both in the short term and the long term.

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