High-Performance Materials and Management Systems to Support Resilient Pavement infrastructure

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Pavement infrastructure represents a massive investment in Canada. Planning, designing, constructing, and managing cost effective, high quality road and airfield pavements is a major challenge to provinces, cities, municipalities and airport authorities. Climate change and associated extreme weather events, including flooding from intense rainfall and snowmelt, increased freeze thaw cycling and heatwaves have had a dramatic impact on pavement performance in Canada, resulting in rapid pavement deterioration, safety concerns and increased costs.  There is an urgent need to understand these impacts on Canadian pavement networks and to develop mitigation strategies, adaptive designs and innovative management techniques that produce safe long-life cost-effective pavement infrastructure. The vision of this research program is to develop novel resilient pavement designs and management tools, by using fundamental scientific findings, to improve pavement engineering in Canada over the next decade and beyond. This unique holistic approach which examines materials, design, and performance deals with all components of the pavement life cycle. The objectives of this Discovery grant include: investigating climate change and extreme weather impacts on pavement networks; developing deterioration models for pavement, examining engineered materials, designs and pavement treatments that improve understanding how advanced monitoring tools can be used to mitigate pavement damage, and determining adaptation strategies that provide technical, economic and environmental benefit for both current and future pavement networks. The overall research framework will use up-to-date loading and environmental information so that pavement can be designed or possibly retro-fit/adapted for long-life performance. The global relevance and potential for socioeconomic impact of this research is immense. If a pavement is going to achieve a longer in-service life, it must consider both loading and environmental impacts over that life cycle period. This involves better understanding of the current and future impacts of both the number and duration of freeze thaw cycles, precipitation quantities and changes in minimum and maximum pavement temperatures, as all these factors impact pavement performance.  Innovative novel pavement technologies that advance and extend pavement life with a strong emphasis on resiliency and usage of durable, long lasting materials will be a focus. The research will also utilize data and new methods/tools to develop realistic long-term performance models and will consider constructability of new designs/materials and innovative low cost monitoring methods. Practitioners and policy makers will benefit from this research through improved safety, serviceability, realization of improved cost effectiveness, the development of guidelines for better pavement design, sustainable usage of materials, and by adding highly skilled people to this field of research.