DRAINAGE OF CONCRETE PAVEMENTS - EXPERIMENTS ON THE EXISTING PAVEMENT OF THE A1 MOTORWAY

Recent observations on concrete pavements have led to a keen awareness of the role of water in pavements. Present pavement design techniques aim at eliminating as efficiently as possible the water that has infiltrated into the roadbase despite all precautions taken to prevent this infiltration. In the case of existing pavements, the experiment described here, which deals with the mechanical and hydraulic behaviour of a pavement after installation of an experimental drainage device (which was instrumented with a view to obtaining specific measurements) shows that: (1) the a-posteriori installation of the drainage device in a worn, highly-trafficked road with a locally eroded foundation accelerates the deterioration process; (2) the quantity of water collected by a drainage system is very large, especially when the joints are not impervious any more; (3) the water drained internally carries large quantities of fine particles, especially when rain first starts, and this partly explains the deterioration of the pavement. (TRRL)