Structural Response of Pervious Concrete Pavement Systems Using Falling Weight Deflectometer Testing and Analysis

Abstract

Although pervious concrete material properties, mix design, and storm water applications are well documented in the literature, the structural behavior of pervious concrete pavement systems has not been investigated. A parking lot was constructed in which traditional impervious concrete was used on half of the parking lot and pervious concrete was used on the other half. The traditional concrete layer was placed on natural subgrade. The pervious concrete portion was divided into two sections with two pervious concrete mixtures and aggregate base thicknesses of 300 and 450 mm. To better understand the behavior of traditional and pervious concrete pavement systems of the parking lot, the subgrade soil properties were characterized by using plate load testing and nuclear density gauge. Furthermore, the aggregate base layers used in the pervious concrete systems were characterized by using plate load testing. After constructing the parking lot, falling weight deflectometer (FWD) testing was performed on the traditional concrete and the two pervious concrete pavement systems. In addition to summarizing the subgrade and base material properties, this paper compares the response of the three pavement systems during FWD tests. Furthermore, artificial neural network-based backcalculation models were used to better understand the response of the three pavement systems. FWD results show that a pervious concrete pavement system with 450-mm aggregate base experiences smaller measured deflections and better uniform support than the traditional concrete pavement system.