Case study of a SAP‐CRC bridge deck in Lu‐shan County, Henan, China

Abstract

AbstractThree‐Mile‐River Bridge is located in Lu‐shan County, Henan, China. The bridge length is 80 m and width is 17.25 m with the deck thickness being 0.3 m. The deck construction is finished in June 2018, which consumed 200 cubic meter of crumb rubber concrete (CRC) with added super‐absorbent polymer (SAP), and opens for traffic in July 2018. This is the first case of SAP‐CRC bridge deck reported to the public with “pump concrete” technical being employed. The scanning of SAP‐CRC samples taken from the job site shows that rubber crumbs are largely uniformly distributed. The free restrained test on SAP‐CRC concrete and the test of restrained externally squared eccentric ring experiment on the mortar specimens made by filtering 10 mm coarse crumbs out of paving concrete show that SAP‐CRC exhibits an improved property in shrinkage behavior and cracking resistance. The original deck design is a three‐layer configuration: 0.3 m concrete + water approval sealing + 0.03 m hot mix asphalt. Consider CRC's excellence in preventing cracking, the sealing, and hot mix asphalt is removed, which results in a 10% reduction in construction cost and time. It is a technical success to add SAP into fresh CRC to suppress so called “rubber particle up‐floating phenomenon,” as well as an engineering/commercial success in the sense that this deck project is implemented following common practices of commercial construction operation and cost‐saving, which sets an case study to future similar applications that potentially will consume large quantity, if not all, of recycled rubbers from scrap tires worldwide.