An Innovative Rehabilitation Approach for the Bridge Deck Pavement

This study presents a rehabilitation method for the bridge deck pavement which has been damaged due to a moisture related failure of the asphalt concrete. In order to quickly drain the water which has infiltrated into the bridge deck pavement, this rehabilitation method adopts a new drainage system including a porous asphalt concrete layer and a polymer concrete based waterproofing layer so that the water cannot stay and cause moisture-related failure on the bridge deck. The most important factors for this drainage system are to meet satisfactory performance of the repairing material for the damaged concrete bridge deck, the waterproofing layer, and to develop a fast-track construction technique with a limited traffic blocking time. The porous asphalt mixtures for the new drainage system was suggested with the maximum aggregate size of 10mm, and was validated through various physical and mechanical laboratory tests to confirm its performance characteristics. In this study, methyl methacrylate (MMA)-type material was introduced for the water-proofing on the concrete bridge deck and damaged bridge deck repairing, and the results from a series of mechanical tests for evaluating the performance of the MMA material shows it has good capability for waterproofing and repairing of the concrete bridge deck which is subject to a moisture-induced neutralization of the cement concrete. In addition, to evaluate the field performance of the new rehabilitation method, a field study was conducted on a real bridge. Field performance observations on both the MMA and pavement materials indicated that the new method performs much better than traditional methods in draining water that has infiltrated into pavement layers.