U.S. Department of Transportation
Federal Highway Administration
1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20590
202-366-4000
Federal Highway Administration Research and Technology
Coordinating, Developing, and Delivering Highway Transportation Innovations
| Project Information | ||
| Project ID: | FHWA-PROJ-09-0056 | |
| Project Name: | Geotextile Separation Layer for Aggregate Base Courses | |
| Project Status: | Temporarily Suspended | |
| Start Date: | October 1, 2009 | |
| End Date: | December 31, 2012 | |
| Contact Information | ||
| Last Name: | Gibson | |
| First Name: | Nelson H | |
| Telephone: | 202-493-3073 | |
| E-mail: | nelson.gibson@dot.gov | |
| Office: | Office of Infrastructure Research and Development | |
| Team: | Pavement Materials Team [HRDI-10] | |
| Program: | Innovative Pavement Research and Deployment | |
| Laboratory: | Pavement Testing Facility | |
| Project detail | ||
| Roadmap/Focus area(s): | Infrastructure Research and Technology Strategic Plan and Roadmap | |
| Project Description: | The motivation for this research activity is to protect lower volume roads which may become higher volume roads and experience increased truck traffic loads and volumes. The Accelerated Pavement Testing Facility at present cannot be used for such testing due to concerns with disturbing the site and adversely impacting existing Accelerated Pavement Testing experiments. Test pits are available with loading frames for conducting this research. The test pits are very attractive due to their large size, ability to instrument the site, and, more importantly, the ability to control saturation and water table level. Proposed is the development of a very low-cost repeated loading system to quantify performance and cost benefits from using a geotextile as a separation layer to keep subgrade fines and a high quality granular base from migrating and contaminating. The test pits would afford the opportunity to have a more robust research program than using the Accelerated Pavement Testing Facility, as more material and variable thickness can be readily constructed and tested. | |
| Goals: | This project will gather saturated and unsaturated full-scale performance properties with and without separators to define particular changes in engineering properties for performance simulations to develop life-cycle cost analyses. | |
| Product Type: | Data Research report | |
| Expected Benefits: | Benefits include quantifying the relative increase in life from both a stiffness and contamination standpoint provided by a geotextile separation layers in vulnerable subgrades/locations. The benefit to the highway community would be a more resilient pavement design for lower volume roads expected to become larger volume roads to be compatible with any long-term regional transportation needs. | |
| Deliverables: | Name: Life-cycle cost analyses. Product Type(s): Research report, Data Description: Example life-cycle cost analyses will be completed using mechanistic-empirical pavement simulations based on the accelerated pavement test performance. | |
| FHWA Topics: | Roads and Bridges--Pavement and Materials | |
| TRT Terms: | Geosynthetics Granular Bases Separation Infrastructure Materials Research Pavements Highways |
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| FHWA Disciplines: | Pavement and Materials |
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| Subject Areas: | Pavements Research Design |
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