Connecting devices between concrete road pavements and existing highway structures

Civil engineering structures, such as bridges, flyovers and underbridges, are discontinuities in a concrete road. Usually, the concrete pavement has to be cut across and in those cases, such as small underbridges, where the concrete pavement can be laid without any discontinuity, differential settlements between embankment and structure have to be taken duly into account. For the design of bridge approaches for motorways, it has been analysed which demands and boundary conditions such approaches should meet. A dominating phenomena is the imposed deformation of the concrete pavement under the influence of temperature variations due to weather influences. In this contribution an explanation will be given by way of a theoretical model why unreinforced concrete pavement tends to 'walk away', near the endings of the pavement. Furthermore, the design of two types of bridge approaches will be explained, which have been applied in newly constructed motorways in the Netherlands.