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Designing Pavements to Support the Heavy Loads in the Energy Development Areas

Project Summary

Designing economical long life pavements to handle the intense traffic loads in the energy development areas presents many challenges to pavement designers. Not least of which is that the existing pavements are relative thin and made with substandard materials. The intense loading and the need to keep the roadway operational at all-times are issues that require new materials and design approaches. Recent failures in South Texas indicate that current design approaches do not work. Failures have recently been encountered with hot mix asphalt (HMA) overlays, and both cement and emulsion stabilization has run into problems with the need for early trafficking of the recently rehabilitated pavements.

The major objectives of this project are as follow: (1.) Determine traffic conditions (in terms of actual axle load level) for pavement designs in the emery) development areas, (2.) Assist local TxDOT Districts in surveying pavement conditions of impacted areas using the state of the art nondestructive test equipment, (3.) Develop materials options for handling the early trafficking requirement which is critical in most recent projects, (4.) Recommend improved pavement designs that are structurally, adequate for overloaded vehicles, and (5.) Work with TxDOT Districts that are currently being severely impacted which include Laredo, San Antonio, Corpus, Odessa, San Angelo, Bryan and Yoakum to design, construct, and monitor test sections with new materials and design approaches.

Project Number

0-6839

Status

Completed

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Project Details

Start Date

1/1/2015

End Date

2/28/2018

Performing Institution(s)

Texas A & M Transportation Institute (TTI)

Research Team

RS: Fujie Zhou

Sponsor

Project Manager

Chris Glancy

Contract Specialist

Daniel Bolden

Amount Funded

FY15: $157,463
FY16: $213,587
FY17: $212,509
FY18: $55,000

Publications from this Project

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More TxDOT Projects Like This

Functional Area

Construction and Maintenance

Index Terms

Hot mix asphalt
Pavement design
Rehabilitation (Maintenance)
Service life
Traffic loads

Lead University

TTI

Researcher

Zhou, Fujie

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Comments

kevyn

See the October 2018 video by TxDOT "West Texas Energy Transportation Challenges" for a summary of some of the challenges that led to this and related research projects: https://youtu.be/_8vSa4ocsis

11/29/2018 at 10:41 AM

Helpful?

Record Added:

3/17/2015

Record Updated:

2/8/2024 5:30 AM EST

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