Development of full-scale laboratory accelerated pavement testing facility: a step toward performance assessment of geosynthetics reinforced pavement

The road network in India is growing at an exponential rate. The biggest challenge in this scenario is an availability of good-quality pavement materials at a reasonable rate. The demands of these pavement materials are increasing at an accelerated rate due to which good-quality material available in nature is getting depleted rapidly. This may create a threat to the environment in the near future. The rate of depletion may be reduced to a certain extent by adopting measures, viz. use of recycled pavement materials, stabilization of locally available poor-quality materials, and use of reinforced pavement. Assessment of such measures in a limited time is the biggest challenge. This challenge may be tackled by using full-scale accelerated pavement testing setup. However, the full-scale accelerated pavement test is not readily available. Over the globe, accelerated pavement testing setups are developed at only a few universities and research institutes. This paper presents the development details of a full-scale laboratory accelerated pavement testing setup. The calibration of the applied axle load is also presented. The developed full-scale laboratory accelerated pavement testing setup will prove opportunity to test new material/technique which will build up the confidence due to gain of knowledge. This paper also aims to investigate the variation of vertical stress and deformation at the base-subgrade interface of geotextile-reinforced and unreinforced pavement using the developed pavement testing facility.