Structural response of grid-reinforced bituminous pavements

Grid reinforcement is becoming a standard construction and rehabilitation technique to improve the performance of bituminous pavements. Currently, selection of the appropriate grid type and position is based on empirical criteria or derived from the results of laboratory tests which consider a single aspect of the mechanical behavior of the grid-reinforced systems. An improvement in the existing design and testing approaches could be obtained considering the actual response of grid-reinforced systems under vehicular loads. An instrumented pavement section was constructed to achieve this objective by installing a glass fiber polymer grid (FP) and a carbon fiber/glass fiber grid (CF) inside a double-layered asphalt surfacing along an in-service road. This pavement is part of a wider project which also involves a RILEM inter-laboratory test on the same reinforced systems. The pavement response to falling weight deflectometer (FWD) and real-scale truck loads was measured using pressure cells and asphalt strain gauges installed inside the pavement. A layered elastic theory (LET) model was adopted to perform both back-calculation of layer moduli and forward-calculation (simulation) of pavement stress and strain. The FWD and the real-scale tests yielded congruent results highlighting that the strain field inside the double-layered surfacing was considerably reduced by the installation of the CF/glass fiber grid whereas the glass FP grid was probably too stiff, potentially leading to interface debonding. The LET model proved to be a simple and effective tool for a first-approach analysis of the reinforcement pavement response.