Design of Reinforced Pavements with Glass Fiber Grids: From Laboratory Evaluation of the Fatigue Life to Accelerated Full-Scale Test

In this paper we present the results of the national French project SolDuGri dealing with pavement reinforcement by glass fiber grids. In this project, an accelerated pavements test (APT) was performed on 6 pavement sections to evaluate the in situ performance of the reinforcement on their lifetime. The tests consisted in building test sections with four different types of grids, and two different compacted asphalt con-crete layers above (hot mix asphalt and warm mix asphalt). A total number of 2.2 mil-lion of 65 kN dual wheel loads was applied on these pavement sections and their per-formance was evaluated using in situ instrumentation, pavement monitoring tests and laboratory tests on recovered specimens. In parallel and in addition to static debond-ing tests, four points bending (4PB) fatigue tests were carried out in the laboratory on reinforced and non-reinforced beams. Two reference glass fiber grids were used, one with a high tensile strength of 100 kN/m and one with a lower tensile strength of 50 kN/m. Laboratory fatigue tests were performed with 2 positions of the rein-forcement in the beams to evaluate the effect of reinforcement for any position of the grid in the beam. Based on the results of the 4PB fatigue tests, a methodology is proposed to evaluate the lifetime of the full-scale test sections, and the predictions are compared with the results of the APT experiment showing good agreement.