Impact of Curling and Warping on Concrete Pavement

Thumbnail Image
Date
2016-07-01
Authors
Gopalakrishnan, Kasthurirangan
Kim, Sunghwan
Alhasan, Ahmad
Yang, Shuo
Major Professor
Advisor
Committee Member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Authors
Person
Ceylan, Halil
Professor Professor
Person
Gopalakrishnan, Kasthurirangan
Research Associate Professor
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Organizational Unit
Institute for Transportation
InTrans administers 14 centers and programs, and several other distinct research specialties, and a variety of technology transfer and professional education initiatives. More than 100 Iowa State University faculty and staff work at InTrans, and from 200 to 250 student assistants from several ISU departments conduct research while working closely with university faculty. InTrans began in 1983 as a technical assistance program for Iowa’s rural transportation agencies.
Journal Issue
Is Version Of
Versions
Series
Department
Institute for Transportation
Abstract

Portland cement concrete (PCC) pavement undergoes repeated environmental load-related deflection resulting from temperature and moisture variations across the pavement depth. This phenomenon, referred to as PCC pavement curling and warping, has been known and studied since the mid-1920s. Slab curvature can be further magnified under repeated traffic loads and may ultimately lead to fatigue failures, including top-down and bottom-up transverse, longitudinal, and corner cracking. It is therefore important to measure the “true” degree of curling and warping in PCC pavements, not only for quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) purposes, but also to achieve a better understanding of its relationship to long-term pavement performance. In order to better understand the curling and warping behavior of PCC pavements in Iowa and provide recommendations to mitigate curling and warping deflections, field investigations were performed at six existing sites during the late fall of 2015. These sites included PCC pavements with various ages, slab shapes, mix design aspects, and environmental conditions during construction. A stationary light detection and ranging (LiDAR) device was used to scan the slab surfaces. The degree of curling and warping along the longitudinal, transverse, and diagonal directions was calculated for the selected slabs based on the point clouds acquired using LiDAR. The results and findings are correlated to variations in pavement performance, mix design, pavement design, and construction details at each site. Recommendations regarding how to minimize curling and warping are provided based on a literature review and this field study. Some examples of using point cloud data to build three-dimensional (3D) models of the overall curvature of the slab shape are presented to show the feasibility of using this 3D analysis method for curling and warping analysis.

Comments

For this and other reports, see the InTrans project page http://www.intrans.iastate.edu/research/projects/detail/?projectID=154056929

Description
Keywords
Citation
Ceylan, H., S. Yang, K. Gopalakrishnan, S. Kim, P. Taylor, and A. Alhasan. 2016. Impact of Curling and Warping on Concrete Pavement. Program for Sustainable Pavement Engineering and Research, Institute for Transportation, Iowa State University, Ames, IA.
DOI
Source
Subject Categories
Copyright
Collections