Roadway Concrete Barrier Design and Performance – Material Durability Issue

Concrete barriers are installed to shield the traveling public from hazardous objects. They canserve to prevent errant vehicles from departing the travel way and to minimize vehicle damagesfrom crossover collisions. Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) has beenbuilding single-slope concrete barrier on highway projects since 2011. It requires lowermaintenance cost, has better crash performance and it is more flexible with overlay projects. As the older barriers built using this design have been in service for several years, some of thebarriers have shown distresses that that may influence long term barrier durability andpotentially the safety of the barrier. A damaged concrete barrier typically requires lane closure,which leads congestions and creates more expensive user costs in addition to the repair cost. There are various possible causes for distresses and many of them could cause long term maintenance issues. There is a potential for some of the distresses to influence the safety performance of the concrete barrier. The goal of this project is to investigate concrete distresses showing in single-slope concrete barriers on highway projects and make recommendations to update current WisDOT barrier practices such as concrete barrier design, construction method, and maintenance procedure to achieve the long-term performance of them.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $150000
• Contract Numbers:

  0092-19-03

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Wisconsin Department of Transportation

  4802 Sheboygan Avenue
  Madison, WI  United States  53707
• Project Managers:

  Kang, Myungook

• Performing Organizations:

  University of Wisconsin, Madison

  Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
  1415 Engineering Drive
  Madison, WI  United States  53706
• Principal Investigators:

  Pincheira, Jose

  Prabhakar, P

• Start Date: 20181001
• Expected Completion Date: 20210301
• Actual Completion Date: 0

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Barriers (Roads); Concrete
• Subject Areas: Highways; Maintenance and Preservation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01696707
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Wisconsin Department of Transportation
• Contract Numbers: 0092-19-03
• Files: RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Feb 28 2019 12:17PM