An innovative rehabilitation technique for airport concrete pavements

This paper describes an innovative methodology for the rehabilitation of concrete slabs of airports pavements. The rehabilitation technique is based on the use of a geocomposite and of an overlay made of a special open-graded bituminous mixture filled with mortar. The research consisted of the development of a Finite Element Model able to analyze the response of the rehabilitation system over the cracked slabs. The technique was then tested through two fullscale tests. The first field test section was aimed at defining the best construction procedure. The second one was carried out in airport to directly evaluate the response under traffic. Tests were performed to quantify the increase of the structural and functional performance of the pavement after the rehabilitation. Finally, the methodology was applied in a real case, on a wide scale (about 120000m2) at two Italian airports.