Mechanical Properties of Rigid Pavements Incorporating Different Percentage of Steel Fiber

Abstract

Nowadays, rigid pavement construction has widely used in road construction industry. Although rigid pavement is widely used in road construction, it tends to fail within time due to many reasons. Fatigue is the important aspect in the rigid pavement design. Due to applications of the heavy loads fatigue occurs in the pavement in the form of micro cracks. Fatigue concepts which is an important parameter in cement concrete pavement and mainly failure occurs due to fatigue failure. As a result, it is crucial to optimize and improving concrete structures to suit diverse engineering requirements. This paper investigates the effect of steel fiber on the improvement of structural behavior such as compressive, tensile and also flexural stiffness performance of rigid pavements. In this respect, the concrete mix design accordance to Design of Normal Concrete Mix (DOE) method was employed in the preparation of the specimens. A series of concrete laboratory tests have been carried out to evaluate the mechanical properties of the concrete sample incorporating 1, 3 and 5% of steel fiber. As a result, the performance (compressive, tensile and flexural) of modified rigid pavements improved remarkably 15-60% with 5% additive of steel fibre at 7 and 18 days curing time. Based on these studies, the addition of steel fiber reinforcement into the rigid pavements has a significant effect on mechanical properties of reinforced concrete mixture.