Pavement for a Polyvalent Area for Its Use as a Fairground in Écija

Setting pavement requirements for a not well-defined and not expressly foreseen use, implies the need of anticipating the different options of utilization that they will have to resist along their useful life. In this paper, it deals with paving an area of more than 11,000 m2 with a polyvalent use: eventual fairground during part of September, street market area one day per week, parking place for the surrounding buildings and eventual driving school track for trailer trucks. An acceptable resistance for the load bearing points of the funfair machines, non-slippery surface for a safe pedestrian use and adequate flexotraction and friction resistance to support the traffic are the main request. The previous asphalt paving had a lot of surface irregularities, it had a lot of areas without top asphalt layer covering and many pot holes and hollows. Possibly these defects were caused by a bad quality of the base and subbase of the pavement and also because of the effects of point loads and heavy traffic. The existence of this defects stop us the implementation of other options that would be interesting in another cases, like “Ultra Thin Whitetopping (UTW)” directly above asphalt paving. Therefore, in this project we opted to demolish the surface, base and subbase layers, completely. The working conditions were climatically extreme for concrete laying and spreading. This works took place during July and August in Écija, which is a Sevillian town that reaches the highest temperatures of the European continent. These values rise above forty-six degrees (+46 oC, +115 oF). Adopted methods and final results are the content of this paper.