Boone County Expo Research Phase I - Granular Road Compaction and Stabilization

Project Details

STATUS

Completed

PROJECT NUMBER

12-433

START DATE

03/14/12

END DATE

12/31/13

FOCUS AREAS

Infrastructure

RESEARCH CENTERS InTrans, CEER, CTRE

Researchers

Principal Investigator

David White

Co-Principal Investigator

Pavana Vennapusa

Student Researcher(s)

Peter Becker

About the research

The Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) worked with its research partners to design comparative pavement foundation test sections at the Central Iowa Expo Site in Boone, Iowa. The project was constructed from May through July 2012. Sixteen different 700 ft long test sections were constructed on 4.8 miles of roadway with the following goals:

Construct a test area that will allow long-term performance monitoring
Develop local experience with new stiffness measurement technologies to assist with near-term implementation
Increase the range of stabilization technologies to be considered for future pavement foundation design to optimize the pavement system

The test sections involved using the following stabilization technologies: woven and non-woven (NW) geosynthetic materials; triaxial and biaxial geogrids; 4 in. and 6 in. geocells + non-woven geosynthetics; portland cement (PC) and fly ash (FA) stabilization; PC stabilization of recycled subbase layer; PC + fiber stabilization of the subbase layer with polypropylene (PP) fibers and monofilament-polypropylene (MF-PP) fibers; mechanical stabilization; and high-energy impact compaction.