ABSTRACT
This paper presents a summary of research work performed in connection with a European Union financed REFLEX project to investigate the use of steel net reinforcement in unbound layers of flexible pavement constructions. The research work has included the monitoring of existing road structures reinforced with steel nets, the construction and monitoring of a test road in Northern Sweden, various types of laboratory tests and a full-scale accelerated loading test performed with the HVS-Nordic testing facility.
Generally the effect of reinforcement on the resilient responses of a reinforced pavement structure has been observed to be fairly modest. Meantime, however, the favorable effect of steel net reinforcement in the performance of the pavement structure e.g., in terms of delaying rut development has been observed to be remarkable, typically of the order of 20 to 50%. A physical explanation to this dilemma is suggested in the paper. Furthermore, a directly applicable modeling approach that takes into account the effect of reinforcement in mechanistic pavement analysis is presented.
