Design of Concrete Pavement for the Ohio Turnpike’s Mainline Pavement Replacement: An Innovative Approach

Abstract

This paper describes the design of a concrete pavement for a section of the Ohio Turnpike’s mainline pavement. This design is a part of the Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission’s ongoing project to replace its existing two lanes of 241.26 miles long mainline pavement in both directions (east and west). The original pavement was built as concrete pavement which was subsequently overlaid with asphalt. Resource International, Inc. used current methods of pavement design, including Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG), to design a concrete pavement and a composite pavement for this project. The concrete pavement for this section of the Turnpike was designed as a wide width (14’) pavement for the outside lane. This made it possible to build an outside shoulder with Recycled Cement Concrete Aggregates from old pavement and still achieve the benefits of a tied shoulder (decreased slab thickness). The construction of this pavement section (as a composite pavement) was completed in 2011 (WB) and 2012 (EB). Performance data has been collected since its construction. This paper describes the design of the pavement and observations of its performance made so far. The details of testing methods used, analysis performed, and the results are also described in the paper.