Analysis and design of a stabilized fly ash as pavement base material

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to utilize a class F fly ash as base material in road pavements. Since class F fly ashes do not manifest desirable engineering properties for this purpose, it was decided to stabilize the material with cement. Fly ash may be utilized with or without aggregate as a pavement layer. It should be noted that, in this research only aggregate free stabilized mixtures (fly ash and cement only) were used since the aim was to utilize high volumes of this waste material. Cement content in the stabilized, laboratory prepared samples were between 2%, 4%, 8%, and 10% by total weight. Initially, Texas triaxial test was carried out to justify the suitability of the fly ash as pavement material. Then, mechanical tests were performed to obtain the fundamental properties of the cement stabilized material in order to analyze the pavement structure. Under repeated wheel loading, fatigue cracking is the primary mode of failure of stabilized materials in which cracks initiate due to the repeated tensile stresses. Utilizing an accelerated full scale road test data for the fatigue performance of cement stabilized fly ash and performing a mechanistic-empirical design procedure, required layer thickness for different lives were obtained for different amount of cement content.