LIFE CYCLE COST ANALYSIS FOR SELECTING PAVEMENT MAINTENANCE ALTERNATIVES, A CASE STUDY OF KOTA - BARAN ROAD (NH-27)
Post Graduate Student, BVM Engineering College, Vallabh Vidyanagar, India
ABSTRACT
Most of our roads are bituminous pavements. Bituminous pavements are showing early sign of distresses worldwide due to increasing loads, intensity of traffic, high tyre pressure, etc. The rutting, cracking, ageing, etc. are quite common. Performance of bituminous pavements in hot climatic regions is thus becoming somewhat doubtful. Concrete on the other hand is known to be a relatively stiffer material and is relatively less sensitive to high temperature. Accordingly, concrete pavements can be adopted as an alternative to traditional bituminous pavements. Therefore, cost-effectiveness of PCC overlays (whitetopping) over bituminous overlay needs to be examined. Use of concrete overlay as a rehabilitation measure for strengthening of deteriorated bituminous pavements is increasing. This is one of the rehabilitation method which results in lower maintenance cost. This method of maintenance and rehabilitation of deteriorated bituminous pavements can be adopted after Life Cycle Cost Analysis. By adopting whitetopping, a large network of roads can be rehabilitated at reasonable costs and these rehabilitated roads will have an improved lifespan than conventional flexible pavements. Whitetopped roads on an average have proved to be quite cost-effective besides giving an additional life of 20 to 30 years on average. In the present study, an attempt is made to evaluate the structural and functional condition of the existing flexible pavement at Kota Baran Road (NH-27) s and provide a cost effective rehabilitation solution. The field work consists of road inventory, traffic studies, Bump Integrator, Visual pavement condition survey and BBD studies. The summary of overall condition assessment on functional and structural evaluation resulted overlay. In the present work, an attempt is made to design concrete overlay section as a rehabilitation alternative for the in-service flexible pavements and compared to conventional flexible overlays with Life Cycle Cost Analysis. Sensitivity analysis for risk and uncertainty analysis is done for different discount rate and inflation rate.





