Internally Cured Concrete for Use in Concrete Pavement Using Accelerated Pavement Testing and Finite-Element Analysis

Abstract

Three full-size instrumented test slabs were constructed and tested by a heavy vehicle simulator (HVS) to evaluate the structural behaviors of internally cured concrete (ICC) for pavement use in Florida conditions. Three mix designs from a prior laboratory testing program were selected. The selected mixtures were a standard mixture with 0.40 water-cement (w/c) ratio, an ICC mixture with 0.40 w/c ratio, and an ICC mixture with 0.32 w/c ratio. Concrete samples were made and tested for their strength, elastic modulus, coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), and shrinkage properties in the laboratory. A three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) model developed was calibrated by using a falling weight deflectometer (FWD) deflection basin as well as strain data under the HVS loading. From this study, it was found that ICC slabs appear to have better potential performance on the basis of the results of the critical stress analysis and the visual inspection of the test slabs.