Enhancing the Resilience of Concrete Pavements Using Service Life Prediction Models

This paper aims to investigate the performance of concrete pavements to enhance the sustainability and resilience of transportation infrastructure. Concrete pavements are subject to extreme demands due to constantly increasing service loads, severe environmental conditions due to climate change, and natural or man-made disasters. Transport properties of concrete and associated measures with these properties, such as chloride penetration and electrical resistivity, have shown to be reliable parameters for the service life prediction of concrete in respect to durability criteria. The methodology of this paper relies on numerical simulation of the performance of concrete pavements using transport properties in a deterministic approach. Environmental conditions have been incorporated in the simulation to represent various climate zones with realistic conditions including moisture and temperature. Further, properties and characteristics of concrete materials have been determined based on existing design criteria for concrete pavements. Hence, results indicate the interaction between physical strength-based and chemical durability-based criteria and their adequacy to assess the service life of concrete pavements. These results offer opportunities to quantify the resilience of concrete pavements in response to climate change and disasters.