Evaluation of Pavement Structure Reinforced with Steel Fabrics

This paper describes the rehabilitation procedure of an old cracked asphalt pavement located at E6 motorway in the West of Sweden. A trial has been made to design the road structure with steel fabric reinforcement in the asphalt concrete. Three full-scale, 100-meter test sections were built. Two test sections were reinforced with steel fabrics and one section without reinforcement as a reference road section. These sections are instrumented with strain gauges. The sections have been tested by deflection measurements with Falling Weight Deflectometer, strain measurements at the bottom surface of the overlays, strain on the steel bars, unevenness and rut depth measurements and manual distress surveys. This work is a part of a co-operation project, called REFLEX, partly financed by the European Commission. The objective is to evaluate the performance of new and rehabilitated road structures reinforced with steel fabric. Initial strain measurements at the bottom surface of the asphalt layers are showing much lower strains in the reinforced test sections than in the reference section without reinforcement. Design, measurements and conclusions after one-year of traffic and the installation technique are presented in this paper. For the covering abstract see ITRD E118503.