Fifteen Years Performance of a Concrete Pavement Rehabilitation Project in Canada

The Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO) undertook the rehabilitation of an exposed concrete pavement exhibiting various distress manifestations in the summer of 1989. Highway 126 in Southwestern Ontario is a four-lane divided arterial with 22,000 AADT and 9.6% commercial traffic in year 2000. The existing pavement, originally constructed in 1963, consisted of 230 mm mesh reinforced Portland Cement Concrete (PCC) pavement with dowelled joints at a spacing of 21.3 m. The rehabilitation strategy selected for southbound lanes was a 180 mm thick plain jointed unbonded PCC overlay to address the severe 'D' cracking and spalling at all the joints and cracks. The rehabilitation of the northbound lanes, which had experienced moderate deterioration, consisted of using the latest concrete pavement rehabilitation (CPR) techniques, material specifications and construction methods, which included full depth repair, partial depth repair, diamond grinding and joint sealant replacement. This paper will discuss the evaluation of this rehabilitated pavement in terms of roughness measurements, frictional resistance measured, and pavement condition ratings. Overall, the fifteen-year performance of the rehabilitated concrete pavements has been good with acceptable levels of ride quality, frictional resistance and distress propagation.