FEASIBILITY OF PRECAST PRESTRESSED CONCRETE PAVEMENTS

As the number of vehicles continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, pavements continue to deteriorate faster, requiring rehabilitation and/or replacement. Pavement construction, however, can cause significant traffic delays, particularly in urban and densely populated areas. These traffic delays increase user costs in the form of increased fuel consumption and lost work time, among many other variables. A method for expediting construction of durable high performance pavements is, therefore, needed. Under this preface, and due to the success of precast concrete techniques in the building and bridge industries, the feasibility of using precast prestressed concrete panels to expedite pavement construction was examined. The primary advantage of precast panels is that they can be set in place and assembled quickly, allowing traffic back onto the pavement almost immediately. This will allow pavement construction to be carried out in overnight or weekend operations, when traffic volumes are low, resulting in tremendous savings in user costs. Also, by incorporating prestressing, a precast pavement can be designed for an increased design life to that of a conventional pavement, with a significant reduction in pavement thickness. This will not only reduce the weight of the panels for transportation and handing, but will also allow the thickness of the pavement to be tailored to the specific application for which it will be used by simply adjusting the magnitude of prestress. This paper will describe the key aspects of a concept for a precast prestressed concrete pavement which were generated through a feasibility study. As the feasibility of the proposed concepts will, ultimately, only be realized through actual implementation, this paper will also discuss a small-scale pilot project currently being undertaken to test and refine these concepts.