Comparison of Low-Volume Road Pavement Performance with Results of Accelerated Pavement Testing

Weathered basalts are polygonal fragments of various dimensions generally spread in a wide grading envelope. They are found in high-volume portions of basaltic spills where the rock is extremely fractured and where degradation processes prevail over decomposition. This material was used as base and subbase layers of experimental pavement sections tested with a heavy traffic simulator. The same material was used as the base and subbase of a pavement on a low-volume road in Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil, that was monitored for 10 years. The main conclusion from the study is that the low-volume road pavement presented different forms of surface degradation in comparison with the experimental road tested with the traffic simulator. The design model obtained in the traffic simulator study was used to identify the point at which the pavement started to deteriorate and thereby identify when a maintenance program was needed rather than to predict when the pavement had already fully deteriorated.