Review of reflective cracking in composite pavements

Reflective cracking is identified as the main weakness of composite pavement in airfield and highways forcing the authorities to devote a large portion of their budget to rehabilitation and/or reconstruction of the existing composite pavements. It is, therefore, very important to have a better understanding of the reflective cracking mechanism to propose the most effective remedial solution(s), which corresponds to that mode of failure. Moreover, it is inevitable to develop a proper constitutive model, which can simulate the reflective cracking performance of the composite pavements as close as possible to the field conditions. The key step to develop such a model, would be therefore, identifying the current gaps within the literature to facilitate further developments and improvements in those areas. This paper is the outcome of a comprehensive literature review which was carried out as part of a current research project, to better understand the problem and identify the gaps within the literature. Three major gaps in terms of required laboratory testing setups, potential improvements in retardation approaches and development of proper numerical models have been identified by the authors which will be further discussed in this paper.