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Chapter: Civil : Highway Planning and Alignment : Design Of Flexible And Rigid Pavements

Types of Flexible Pavements

The following types of construction have been used in flexible pavement: Conventional layered flexible pavement, Full - depth asphalt pavement, and Contained rock asphalt mat (CRAM).

Flexible pavements

 

Flexible pavements will transmit wheel load stresses to the lower layers by grain-to-grain transfer through the points of contact in the granular structure (see Figure 19:1). The wheel load acting on the pavement will be distributed to a wider area, and the stress decreases with the depth. Taking advantage of this stress distribution characteristic, flexible pavements normally has many layers. Hence, the design of flexible pavement uses the concept of layered system. Based on this, flexible pavement may be constructed in a number of layers and the top layer has to be of best quality to sustain maximum compressive stress, in addition to wear and tear. The lower layers will experience lesser magnitude of stress and low quality material can be used. Flexible pavements are constructed using bituminous materials. These can be either in the form of surface treatments (such as bituminous surface treatments generally found on low volume roads) or, asphalt concrete surface courses (generally used on high volume roads such as national highways). Flexible pavement layers reflect the deformation of the lower layers on to the surface layer (e.g., if there is any undulation in sub-grade then it will be transferred to the surface layer). In the case of flexible pavement, the design is based on overall performance of flexible pavement, and the stresses produced should be kept well below the allowable stresses of each pavement layer.

 

Types of  Flexible Pavements

 

The  following types  of  construction  have  been  used  in   flexible  pavement:

 

Conventional layered flexible pavement,

 

Full - depth asphalt pavement, and

 

Contained  rock  asphalt  mat  (CRAM).

 

Conventional flexible pavements are layered systems with high quality expensive materials are placed in the top where stresses are high, and low quality cheap materials are placed in lower layers.

 

Full - depth asphalt pavements are constructed by placing bituminous layers directly on the soil sub-grade. This is more suitable when there is high traffic and local materials are not available.

 

Contained rock asphalt mats are constructed by placing dense/open graded aggregate layers in between two asphalt layers. Modified dense graded asphalt concrete is placed above the sub-grade will significantly reduce the vertical compressive strain on soil sub-grade and protect from surface water.


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Civil : Highway Planning and Alignment : Design Of Flexible And Rigid Pavements : Types of Flexible Pavements |


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