EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION ON THE PROPERTIES OF CONCRETE FOR RIGID PAVEMENT CONSTRUCTION WITH PET FIBRES

Abstract

A pavement is a structure composed of structural elements, whose function is to protect the natural sugared and to carry the traffic safety and economically. The surface of any roadway should be stable and non-yielding to allow heavy wheel loads of road traffic to move with least possible rolling resistance. The road surface should also be even along the longitudinal profile to enable fast vehicles to move safely and smoothly at design speed. Road surfaces must also maintain their strength in adverse environmental conditions The pavement carries the wheel load and transfers the load stresses through a wider area on the soil subgrade below. A pavement layer is considered more effective or superior, if it is able to distribute the wheel load stress through a larger area per unit depth of the layer. One of the objectives of a well designed and constructed pavement is therefore to keep this elastic deformation of the pavement within permissible limits, so that the pavement can sustain a large number of repeated load applications during the design life. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the possibility of using granulated plastic waste materials to partially substitute for the fine aggregate (sand) in concrete composites. The polyethylene (PET) bottle which can easily be obtained from the environment with almost no cost is shredded and added into ordinary concrete to examine the strength behaviour of various specimens