“Four integrations” to solve the technical bottleneck of long-life asphalt pavement

Abstract

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening, the highway construction in China has grown from scratch, and highway construction capabilities have reached the world’s advanced level. By 2020, China has built the world’s longest national expressway network, which strongly supports the rapid economic development. However, the asphalt pavements of highways in China are still facing many problems such as short service life, high consumption of social and natural resources, and high operation and maintenance costs, and it is difficult to meet the requirements of full life cycle technical and economic optimization. The sustainable development of expressway asphalt pavement urgently needs the support of long-life asphalt pavement technology. To scientifically construct the technical standards and system for long-life asphalt pavements in China, the urgent need for long-life asphalt pavement in the sustainable development of expressways and its practice and development status in China must be understood, and the basic science and key technical issues must be gained insight into to prescribe the right medicine. The major demand issues for long-life asphalt pavements in China’s expressways, including how pavement structures and materials respond to increasingly severe heavy-load traffic and complex natural environments, the contradiction between huge resource consumption caused by periodic reconstruction and energy saving and environmental protection, and the imbalance of construction, management and maintenance were pointed out in this paper. Facing the significant demands for long-life asphalt pavement in the sustainable development of expressways in China, with the aid of the practice and development status of long-life asphalt pavement technology in our country, the relevant experiences and lessons of developed countries must be learnt and drew. Through the research and engineering practice of a large number of long-life asphalt pavements in China, four key technical issues that need to be solved urgently for long-life asphalt pavements were extracted, namely, the damage control mechanism of long-life asphalt pavement structure and materials, design theories and methods, and service performance monitoring technology and construction quality control, etc. In order to solve the four key problems, the overall strategy and specific ideas for constructing a long-life asphalt pavement technical system are proposed, which are the integration of roadbed and pavement, structure and material, design and construction, and construction and maintenance. Through the realization of comprehensive technical system and standards of the “four integrations” for long-life asphalt pavement, a new generation of long-life asphalt pavement structure technical standards and technical systems suitable for my country’s characteristics are scientifically constructed to break the technical bottleneck of asphalt pavement of highways in China under heavy traffic and complex natural environmental conditions, promoting the transformation of traditional asphalt roads to a new generation of green durable roads.