Abstract Manager

Extreme weather events and shifting precipitation patterns pose a significant threat to the longevity and performance of traditional pavement structures. As climate change continues to exert its influence on infrastructure, the design and maintenance of pavements face unprecedented challenges. With  irregular changes in temperature the pavement layers, including the  subgrade, tend to lose strength faster. With the fluctuating temperature regime, the band within which the frost depth varies is closer to the subgrade and sometimes even reaches base level elevation. The current fluctuation in temperature can lead to multiple cycles of freeze-thaw within the one season thus leading to the early failure of roads and increasing the demand for maintenance.

This paper studies the stress on pavement infrastructure and the progressive loss of strength due to freeze-thaw cycles for a road embankment. This research highlights the inadequacies of conventional pavement designs in adapting to the dynamic nature of changing weather patterns, emphasizing the urgent need for innovative solutions. An innovative solution with novel polymeric alloy (NPA) geocell was used to reinforce the base course of a paved road in Sturgeon County, Alberta and instrumentation was done to obtain real time traffic load measurements and temperature variations along the embankment depth.

A geo-composite was also incorporated into the road application at Sturgeon County to act as a reference for the results of the geocell-reinforced pavement. The performance of the geocell-reinforced and geo-composite-reinforced pavements were continuously monitored through the installation of thermocouples, moisture sensors, and earth pressure cells within the basecourse and subgrade of the road structures. Real time data collected through an entire freeze-thaw season highlighted the growing fluctuation in temperatures reaching the subgrade leading to multiple freeze-thaw cycles within a single season. Further analysis of the data and field-test results emphasized the efficacy of NPA geocell under multiple freeze-thaw cycles. In this research, the theoretical evaluation was validated with practical data from the instrumentation on site.

The use of high strength, high modulus geocell has shown significant benefit with sustaining the necessary confinement over multiple freeze-thaw cycles. These findings enforce the need for innovative solutions, such as the use of NPA geocell-reinforcement, to combat the increasing freeze-thaw degradation.