Full Width Paving – Plain Concrete Pavement Holbrook Bypass Investigation

Conventional plain concrete paving method is to firstly pave the two travel lanes with a single longitudinal sawn induced tied joint, followed by a narrow nearside shoulder paving operation. Full Width Paving (FWP) is paving the whole 10.0 / 10.5m plain concrete pavement (PCP) carriageway width in a single pass with two longitudinal sawn induced tied joints (P1 joints) in the centre of thelanes. The secondary shoulder paving operation is eliminated by adopting FWP. Several 1980’s NSW projects adopted PCP FWP on conventional slab configuration (induced tied joints immediately outside of slow lane) with ribbon induced joints. Personal discussions with people with mid 1980s construction experience revealed the practice of ribbon inducing had performed inconsistently. Ribbon induced joints were discontinued in the late 1980s and FWP paving not pursued.Around 1990 and arising from changed design procedures and increasing design traffic loads, slab thicknesses increased from about 200 to 250mm and thicker. At these increased thicknesses concrete batch plant were not able to supply concrete for FWP. In recent years larger concrete production plants can meet the demand of FWP. Since the 1980s there has been some FWP perception regarding joints in the centre of lanes being disconcerting to motorists,unsafe work zone for slab replacement and incomplete understanding of stress development. These perceptions are resolved as there has been no safety issues with joints centre of lanes recorded to date, FWP offers equivalent shoulder slab width to that of conventional median slab width and over a decade after the first FWP (conventional) trial, a method for analysing stress development is published (Okamoto, February 1994). This report documents the development and history of two PCP FWP trials and one PCP FWP project spanning three Hume Highway projects and five years in southern New South Wales.