ADVANCED CONSTRUCTION PROCEDURES: CONFINED BASES FOR AIRPORT PAVEMENTS. FINAL REPORT

Airports for light aircraft must often be built in areas where base course material is inadequate or economically unavailable. Sand grids may provide an economical solution in these cases. Previous work with sand grids has identified optimum grid-cell geometry based on ultimate bearing capacity. Past observations also suggest the nature of sand-grid behavior for small stresses and strains. From these a model was formulated for analyzing the performance of sand grids in pavement systems and spot-checked using field data from a full-scale, accelerated-traffic sand-grid test section.