Recent Advances and Future Trends in Pavement Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

Pavement engineering uses engineering techniques to design and maintain flexible (asphalt) and rigid (concrete) pavements. Pavement design has gradually evolved within the last century. Prior to the early 1920s, for example, the thickness of pavement was based purely on experience, in the late 1990s, it was already based on application of various developed methods for determining the required thickness of the pavement. The acquired real information regarding traffic and climate in pavement design was possible due to move from empirical methods to mechanistic empirical methods in pavement design, where sound principles were used, for example, to predict stress and strain. Nowadays, a certain difference in quality between designed and constructed pavements is still observed. Therefore, current pavement design, construction and maintenance requirements must be improved. This refers to: 1) real-time data collection (not prediction) from the current traffic intensity and loading, pavement behavior (stress and strain), pavement temperature at different layers, etc.; 2) effective pavement structural design; 3) pavement mix design; 4) pavement bituminous and alternative materials; and 5) application of innovative technologies for the pavement construction, compaction, monitoring and maintenance. Prof. André A.A. Molenaar mentioned during ISAP2018 that “in reality strain signals are completely different from what we use in our tests” but we can verify predicted stress and strain values with real-time values by the monitoring of pavements, for example, by means of installation of fiber Bragg grating sensors in pavement. In the era for industrial technology, asphalt and concrete materials can be integrated into the category of smart materials. Therefore, in a few years, asphalt and concrete industries will need to accommodate more to the innovative solutions for the construction and maintenance of pavements.

This Special Issue, “Recent Advance and Future Trends in Pavement Engineering”, aims to provide an overview of current innovative pavement engineering ideas, which have the potential to be implemented in industry in the future, covering all recent developments in pavement design, its construction and monitoring.

Ms. Patricia Kara De Maeijer
Guest Editor

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