Mix Designs Targeting Concrete Flexural Strength and Modulus for Airfield Concrete Pavements

The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) National Airport Pavement Test Facility (NAPTF) is located at the William J. Hughes Technical Center, Atlantic City International Airport, New Jersey. The primary objective of the tests performed at the NAPTF is to generate full-scale pavement performance and response data for development and verification of airport pavement design criteria for rigid and flexible pavement. A construction cycle at the NAPTF includes test pavement construction with embedded instrumentation, traffic tests to failure, post-traffic testing and pavement removal. Construction Cycle 6, currently under construction, will be tested to determine the effects of the concrete flexural strength (R) and modulus of elasticity (E) on rigid pavement structural life. The testing will obtain performance/failure data for low-, medium-, and high-strength concrete test items. In the current FAARFIELD rigid design procedure, concrete flexural strength (R) and modulus (E) are treated as independent variables. This assumption is carried over from the previous FAA design method, in which the constant E of 27,600 MPa (4 million psi) was built into the design curves. In FAARFIELD, R is variable in the range of 3.45 to 5.52 MPa (500 to 800 psi) and E is fixed at 27,600 MPa (4 million psi). This paper will summarize the testing plan and difficulties in obtaining concrete pavement mix designs with a wide enough range in both R and E that are significantly different to make the full scale results meaningful.