Design

The purpose of this article is to provide the administration and the designers with an effective, workable flow-chart so that the quality of the road is priority number one and that the execution problems are manageable. Based on the experience during most recent jobs COPRO observed interesting evolutions and missing...

Road traffic in Germany is increasing steadily year after year and recent forecasts have predicted that it will continue to do so. At the same time, neither the German central government, the federal states nor the towns and cities have the funds required for new infrastructure projects and urgently needed...

Water-permeable paving is used to minimize the far-reaching adverse effects produced by sealing off the natural water balance. The risk of flooding during thunderstorms by water running off the surface or by overflow from sewer pipes is strongly reduced by the immediate absorption and subsequent storage of water in the...

Traffic noise is one of the major environmental concerns within the countries of the European Union. 80 to 90% of the traffic noise pollution is generated by road traffic. The major part of the noise emitted by vehicles on roads in the mid- to high-speed range is nowadays due to...

Skid resistance of a pavement surface is important for safety. Therefore the surface of a concrete pavement must have a roughness suitable for a high skid resistance but also for a low noise emission. These surface properties must be as durable as possible. In Germany there are various possible ways...

The Walloon motorway is the east-west axis in the southern part of Belgium linking the north of France to the southwest of Germany. It was built in the beginning of the 1970’s as a part of the Belgian motorway development program. The design traffic was about 10.000 vehicles a day...

In extensive examinations several measuring methods and parameters were tested and compared, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of different curing compounds and methods. Starting with basic tests concerning the time-dependent water-loss of concrete and the optimal application time of curing compounds, a simple test using a litmus-paper was developed....

A new concept of concrete pavement have been imagined and tested in France since 1998. It consists in a base layer of continuously reinforced concrete, bonded with a foundation layer of asphalt concrete. The stiffness of the asphalt material and its bonding with the concrete layer contribute to rigidify the...

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, HIPERPAV (HIgh PERformance concrete PAVing) is a software tool capable of predicting the early-age behavior of concrete pavements. HIPERPAV successfully integrates materials, pavement design, climate, and construction operations into an easy to use Windows-based software package. Using a systems approach,...

The brightness of concrete pavements is, next to a multitude further, an essential advantage of this method of building vis-à-vis bituminous pavements, because brighter street surfaces affect positively the safety of the road users. Bright concrete surfaces provide above all an increase of safety in rain and in darkness (especially...

Shonan Ohashi Bridge that is on Route 134 is a steel box girder bridge of 530m in length. Six years ago, fatigue cracks were found at the welding tips of bottom deck plates. After the full inspection of the asphalt pavement and steel deck bridge, it was found that the...

Multicriteria aid to decision-making is a set of theories and methods designed to assist decisionmakers in selecting one out of several possible alternatives while considering various points of view or “criteria”. In managing their assets, road managers are often faced with the difficult choice of type of surfacing to suit...