Design of Concrete Pavement - Design Citeria for Plain and Lean Concrete

New road infrastructure projects are important and constitute of large investments that have to serve the society for a long time. The investments have to be durable at the lowest life cycle cost and the pavements have to sustain loads from increasing traffic intensity and heavy traffic loads. In Sweden less than 1 ‰ of the national road network consists of concrete pavements. In parts of Europe and in the U.S., on the other hand, concrete roads are used to a large extent for highways as well as rural roads. To encourage the competition between different road materials in Sweden, the tools for designing robust concrete pavements have to be brought forward. In order to emphasize plain concrete pavements as an alternative in road construction, the design must also be competitive.Plain and lean concrete, separately, but also the in composite beams, have been studied in flexural fatigue testing. The results show that Tepfers’ fatigue criterion is valid for both plain and lean concrete when subjected to flexural fatigue loading. The results also show that the fatigue strength of composite beams of plain and lean concrete is mainly dependent on the strength of the lean concrete but that Tepfers’ fatigue criterion is applicable. The method is possible to develop gradually and is based on FE-analysis for fast computations. In the design, stresses from traffic and temperature loads are calculated simultaneously in a number of critical locations in the concrete slab. The method will also make it possible to alter design features as slab lengths and widths, with various connections between the slabs