Full-Scale Accelerated Pavement Testing and Instrumentation

Abstract

Road and airfield pavements play an important structural and functional role of ensuring safe, economic, and environmentally sustainable mobility of people and freight. Promoting circular economy in transportation infrastructure construction requires using innovative and non-traditional materials and technologies. However, validation is needed prior to their implementation. Hence, construction and monitoring of instrumented trial sections exposed to vehicular and environmental accelerated loading have been usually considered to assess their performance. Pavement embedded instruments allow monitoring the pavement health through measuring layer deformations, strains, stresses, and environmental conditions. Advantages and limitations of various instrument types are presented. In addition, two case studies are discussed.