Paving an engineered cementitious composite (ECC) overlay on concrete airfield pavement for reflective cracking resistance

Reflective cracking at joints or existing cracks is considered as a predominant distress in concrete airfield pavement under combined aircraft wheel and environmental loads. Engineered cementitious composites (ECC) is a kind of ductile concrete, which features of strain-hardening characteristics simultaneously along with multiple micro -cracking. Therefore, it can be a potential material as overlay on original concrete airfield pavement to prevent or delay the development of reflective cracks. In this paper, the mechanical responses of ECC/concrete composite beam with/without initial interfacial delamination under quasi-static and dynamic loads were investigated experimentally. It was found that ECC/concrete beam exhibited significantly superior flexural strength, deformation and fatigue life to that of PCC/concrete beam. In term of impact resistance, ECC overlay maintained impact load-bearing capacity even after 8 impacts, while PCC overlay was fractured into two parts after one impact. The experimental results indicate that ECC overlay paved on concrete airfield pavement could delay the development of reflective crack effectively due to its superior mechanical performance. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.