Pervious concrete as an environmental solution for pavements: Focus on key properties

Abstract

Pervious concrete is considered to be an advanced pavement material in terms of the environmental benefits arising from its basic feature—high water-permeability. This paper presents the results of experimental work that is aimed at testing technically important properties of pervious concrete prepared with three different water-to-cement ratios. The following properties of pervious concrete were tested—compressive and splitting tensile strength, unit weight at dry conditions, void content, and permeability. The mix proportions were expected to have the same volume of cement paste, and, to obtain the same 20% void content for all of the samples. The results show that changes of water-to-cement ratio from 0.35 to 0.25 caused only slight differences in strength characteristics. Arising tendency was found in the case of compressive strength and a decreasing tendency in the case of splitting tensile strength. The hydraulic conductivity ranged from 10.2 mm/s to 7.5 mm/s. The values of both the unit weight and void content were also analysed to compare the theoretical (calculated) values and real experiment results. A fairly good agreement was reached in the case of mixtures with 0.35 and 0.30 water-to-cement ratios, while minor differences were found in the case of 0.25 ratio. Finally, a very tight correlation was found between void content, hydraulic conductivity, and compressive strength.