Study On Structural Design And Construction Process Of Interlocking Block Pavement For Rural Road

Rural road building, as component part of building new socialist countryside, is important to prompt rapid development of countryside economy. The pavement structure to be adopted in rural road is crucial to achieve good level of quality of construction of rural road and public benefit of road investment.At present, concrete interlocking block pavement is hardly adopted in domestic highway construction. In fact, there are many merits of the kind of pavement such as strength and durability of structure, low cost of construction and convenience of maintenance, especially no need of heavy machine but manual labour during construction of the pavement. Whereas the merits of the pavement meet requirement of rural road construction in our country, the study of interlocking block pavement in rural road construction is carried out.In this study, the shape, size and laying patterns of blocks suited to rural road is argued according to mechanistic analysis of both block and pavement structure and actual requirements of construction. Based on the three dimensional finite element method, the behavior of block pavement under the effects of block thickness, base thickness, subgrade modulus and laying pattern were investigated.Structural design study of interlocking block pavement for rural road is developed in this study. For a block pavement using unbound granular materials in the base, the tolerable permanent deformation of pavement as performance criterion is used to design pavement. Where a block pavement incorporated a stabilized coarse aggregate base, design life of the pavement is divided into two stages in which both fatigue cracking at the bottom of base and tolerable permanent deformation is used as design criteria respectively. Where base is stabilized fine aggregate, only fatigue cracking as performance criterion is used. In order to convenience and standardization of pavement design, the nomograghs for structural thickness design of different type of base are also developed.The research of construction process of interlocking block pavement used in rural road is also carried out in this study. Accordingly relevant requirements and criteria for each procedure of construction are provided.