WAY30 is the Ohio Department of Transportation’s test road on US Route 30 in Wayne County, near Wooster, OH, consisting of an 8-mile, $54 million project. It was built using the latest techniques for long-lasting pavements, including long-lived Portland cement concrete (PCC) as well as asphalt concrete Perpetual Pavement construction. Both the rigid and flexible pavements are designed to last 50 years or more with a minimum of required maintenance. ORITE installed instrumentation on the road to monitor the pavements’ response to loads (such as heavy trucks), long-term performance, and environmental factors (such as temperature, moisture, and various weather conditions). The ultimate goal is to verify that these long-lived pavement techniques provide the increased lifetimes that will result in reductions in road repair costs and delays that will greatly repay the additional up-front expense.
Description
The AC perpetual pavement consisted of a 6 inch (15 cm) DGAB base, covered by a 4 inch (10 cm) fatigue-resistant layer, a 9 inch (23 cm) Asphalt Treated Base (ATB) layer, a 1.75 inch (4.45 cm) superpave layer, and topped by a 1.5 inch (3.8 cm) wearing course.
The PCC long-life pavement was built up starting with a 4 inch (10 cm) DGAB with underdrains, a 3 inch (7.5 cm) asphalt concrete base, and a 10 inch (25 cm) layer of jointed plain concrete pavement. The PCC included the substitution of either ground granular blast furnace slag or fly ash for cement. The pavement had 15 foot (4.6 m) slabs with 1.5 inch (3.8 cm) dowel bars at 12-inch spacings; one section featured some experimental dowel bar types.
Sections 664 and 876 on each side were instrumented to monitor relevant soil pressure (using Geokon 3500 pressure cells), displacement (Lucas Schaevitz GPD 121-500 and GPD 121-250 LVDTs), strain (Dynatest PAST II Strain gages on AC only), and temperature (MRC Thermistors) parameters. Environmental data collected from the base and subgrade layers included temperature (MRC thermistors), moisture (Campbell Scientific FHWA TDR probe), frost depth (CRREL Resistivity probe), and groundwater table (piezometers).
Controlled Vehicle Load (CVL) testing was conducted in December 2005 on both AC and PCC, in July 2006 on AC, and in August 2006 on PCC. Tests were run at four speeds ranging from 5 mph (9 km/h) to 60 mph (97 km/h), using single axle and tandem axle vehicles with rear axle loads of up to 40.15 kips (178.6 kN) for tandem axle and 28.2 kips (125.44 kN) for single axle. Some of the 5 mph (8 km/h) loads on PCC in August 2006 were applied along the edge line of the pavement and at the edge of the slab, which was two feet into the shoulder (outside the edge line); otherwise, all runs were along the wheel path.
Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) testing was conducted on each layer during construction and on the finished pavement on both the AC and PCC sides. On the PCC side, the FWD data were used to examine the load transfer capabilities of three types of experimental dowel bars used in Section 877.
Some samples of pavement materials were collected from the AC and PCC sections and were tested in ORITE's laboratories. Some details are included in the project report as needed to augment field results, but most of this work was conducted under a separate project entitled Determination of Mechanical Properties Used in WAY-30 Test Pavements (SJN 437046). Some of the material data for AC was used as inputs into an Elastic Layer System Analysis, where the CVL results were compared to computations using inputs based on a sigmoidal equation, on data collected from field cores, and on data from testing laboratory-prepared samples.