Assessment of Concrete Pavement Blowups

Abstract

The assessment is based on the analyses of pavement blowups presented by the writer and his coworkers Dallis and Shade. The introduction reviews briefly the various early attempts to clarify the blowup phenomenon. The next section describes the blowup mechanism, the adopted criterion of the “safe temperature increase,” and an outline of the analytical methodology this presentation is based on. The third section contains the analytical solutions for three typical pavement problems, the description of steps for their numerical evaluation as well as a list of the used pavement parameters, and a graphical presentation of the obtained results. The fourth and fifth sections contain a discussion of the practical implications of the presented results for concrete pavement design, as well as for assessing pavement blowups after years of service. Also presented are a number of specific pavement problems and suggestions of full-scale tests for the determination of the identified pavement parameters.