First Experiences with Continuously Reinforced Concrete Pavement in National Highway of Bangladesh

The traffic volume on National Highways of Bangladesh is increasing rapidly and this trend is expected to continue in the future. To ensure future mobility and reduce national consequential expenditure on road construction and maintenance, maximum service life is needed. Different states around the world have observed that continuously reinforced concrete pavement (CRCP) has the potential to provide a long-term service life with "zero-maintenance" under heavy traffic loadings and challenging environmental conditions. For the very first time, CRCP has constructed on National Highway-5 under SASEC-2 project through the guidance of Civil Engineering Department of BUET. The pavement consists of 275 mm CRCP slab, 100 mm Lean Concrete Base (LCB), 150 mm subbase with 0.85% in total reinforcement content placed in two layers into CRCP slab. This study aims to compare CRCP of SASEC-2 with international practices, evaluate early age CRCP performance through characteristics of the formed cracks, and identify the linkage of distresses with design, material selection, and construction quality. It is observed that material selection and some construction practices can be linked to formation of variable transverse crack spacing, longitudinal crack, and other distresses. The absence of combined gradation envelop and performance checking charts for aggregate, crack pattern could not be attained as desired. Active crack control through saw-cutting seems effective to reduce unwanted crack patterns and crack width. The observations of this study can be useful to further modification of CRCP practices in Roads and Highways Department.