Experimental Evaluation of Engineered Cementitious Composites as Reflective Crack Control Interlayer for Composite Pavements

TLDR: In this paper, the authors evaluated the effectiveness of ECC as an interlayer system experimentally and found that the composite pavement specimens with ECC interlayer provided significantly higher fatigue life as compared to the control specimens without interlayer.

Abstract: Reflective cracking at transverse joints is considered as a predominant distress in composite pavements. Various interlayers have been used previously to prevent or retard reflective cracking. Engineered cementitious composite (ECC) is a special type of high-performance fiber-reinforced cementitious material that is expected to perform better as an interlayer due to its higher tensile strength and ductility. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of ECC as an interlayer system experimentally. A laboratory test protocol was designed to simulate repeated traffic loads to measure the fatigue performance of ECC interlayer system using digital image correlation (DIC) technique. It was found that the composite pavement specimens with ECC interlayer provided significantly higher fatigue life as compared to the control specimens without interlayer. This result indicates that ECC could be used as a potential effective interlayer system to retard or mitigate reflective cracking.