Towards performance engineered specifications for high early strength concrete pavement repair applications

Repair materials for concrete applications constitute to this day a topic of great interest for state and local transportation agencies. Repair of concrete highways is necessary whenever there is a distress area that, if not properly addressed, would propagate, ending up reducing the service life of the infrastructure and the quality of the ride. Due to the need of quickly re-opening the infrastructure to the traffic, concrete mixtures used in highway repair applications are required to gain strength at a much faster pace than regular concrete mixtures. By uniquely focusing on the strength requirements, other mixture properties such as durability are often neglected, so that many agencies have reported premature failure of the repaired pavement sections, within only a few years from construction. One viable option to address these issues is the adoption of performance-based specifications. One example of existing performance-based specifications documents is the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) R101 (“Developing Performance Engineered Concrete Pavement Mixtures”). AASHTO R101 includes a series of performance tests that can be used to identify suitable concrete mixtures for concrete pavement applications. Very minor prescriptive requirements are included in the standard, thus allowing the concrete producer or state agencies more freedom in the way they are able to satisfy the listed performance requirements. The adoption of similar performance tests in concrete mixtures for repair applications could, for example, promote the mitigation of shrinkage and thermal stresses and the reduction in ionic and fluid penetrability. Based on the existing need of addressing the observed limited service-life of highway repair concrete mixtures, the dissertation focuses on the development of a list of performance-based tests to be used in the formulation of repair concrete mixtures for highway repair applications. Some of the available performance tests from the R101 document, such as formation factor, are directly applied to HES mixtures while other tests, such as mechanical and shrinkage tests, are partially modified to better capture the behavior of HES concrete mixtures in field repair applications.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Civil Engineering

Grantor

The University of Texas at Austin

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Montanari, Luca

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Juenger, Maria C. G.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Kevin Folliard
• Amit Bhasin
• Robert P. Spragg

• Concrete
• Durability
• Repair materials
• High early strength

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/59392

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/132048