Laboratory Studies for a New Self-Compacting Bleeding Cementitious Material For Pavement Bedding

This paper presents a new generation of cementitious material devoted to pavement bedding layer construction and named MACES. This material contains a high volume of water in order to be very fluid and selfcompacting. It has also been designed in such a way that the free water in excess rapidly drains out through the granular skeleton, transforming the material into a compact load-bearing packing of particles. The binder content has been adapted in order to reach a tensile strength of 1 to 2 MPa at one year, which is in the same range as conventional cement-bound graded aggregate. The main advantages of MACES come from the fact that it does not need any external compaction after placing and compact itself by its own weight. In a first part, the paper describes the feasibility trials carried out at the laboratory and the specific methods or devices developed to evaluate the performance of such a material. In a second part, the analysis of typical pavement structures shows its potential technical and economical interest. The last part of the paper is dedicated to the study of the influence of the mix design on the mechanical strength of MACES.