Design

In recent years, several high-profile road tunnel fires have taken place across Europe. These fires inevitably led to important structural damages and even loss of lives. In all of these tunnels, national mandatory safety regulations were implemented. Nevertheless, disasters could not be averted. Apart from a deep knowledge of safety...

Public lighting contributes to the safety and quality of life in urban areas and, like all services, is confronted with the challenge of “doing better with less.” Closer ties between the trades of the road and lighting offer proven opportunities for significant economic and environmental gains once steps are taken...

The project deals with research on effective composite steel and concrete bridge structures, profiting from directly running cement concrete pavements. The aim is an innovative layout solution, technology of construction and maintenance and research of new formulas for concrete parts which will lead to lower collective costs of production and...

Innovative solutions for transport infrastructure are needed to meet future mobility needs, especially in urban areas. Recently, Bombardier Transportation has developed a new system for supply by induction of electrical public transportation vehicles. It consists in integrating electrical supply cables in a prefabricated concrete slab implemented in the road. These...

Concrete pavements are vulnerable to cracking already in the plastic material stage, i.e., before the concrete has reached a significant strength. Due to the evaporation of water at fresh concrete surfaces, a capillary pressure is built up in the pore system of the material. This underpressure leads to the so-called...

The fundamental goal behind any pavement design and construction project is to provide a system that will survive the predicted traffic and environment for the selected lifetime. Considerable effort is paid to the structural design of a pavement in order to reach that goal. On the other hand, the concrete...

Portland Cement Concrete (PCC) pavements usually incur higher investment costs than Asphalt Concrete (AC) alternatives. In a life cycle analysis the higher cost is justified by lower maintenance costs, less and fewer traffic flow intrusions, and a longer technical life. All these factors contribute to a reduction of the carbon...

In this study, possibility of top-down cracking in concrete pavement was investigated. The main cause of the crack is supposed to be tensile stress at the top of the concrete slab. 3DFEM simulations that took into account actual temperature distributions throughout slab depth were performed on concrete pavements for a...

Jointed plain concrete pavements curl due to temperature gradients and warp in the presence of drying shrinkage gradients. Since this deformation is restrained by factors, such as the slab self-weight, tensile stresses are generated. Slabs do not remain flat in the absence of daily gradients. This is due to the...

It has been observed by many researchers that the subgrade behavior is load rate dependent. The apparent subgrade stiffness is much higher under the fast moving axle loading than during the slow developing temperature curling and moisture warping. However, traditionally a single k-value is used for both curling and axle...

In 2010 Houben has published a paper on the modelling of the process of cracking at transverse joints in jointed plain concrete pavements (JPCP). Houben uses equations from the standard Eurocode 2 for the time-dependent concrete properties and considers the thermal deformation and the shrinkage (drying and autogenous) for different...

Current pavement design guides for Jointed Plain Concrete Pavements define one critical location at the mid-slab edge and assume that damage accumulates linearly and can be described via S-N curves. More recently, experiments have shown that damage does not accumulate linearly and a pronounced stress range effect exists. These two...