• International Journal of Highway Engineering
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• v.8 no.3 s.29
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• pp.105-114
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• 2006

A popular alternative to extend the life of aged pavement is asphalt overlay. However, it has a very serious and inherent shortcoming in deterring a reflection crack. Although joint-rehabilitation and stress-relief techniques have been applied to deter such reflection cracks in aged pavement, the techniques had a limited success only in slowing down the progress of a reflection crack. Rubblization technique rubblizes the concrete pavement slab in situ and uses the rubblized slab as the base material. Then, pavement overlay is applied to finish off the rehabilitation of aged pavement. This rubblization technique has the advantage of solving the problem of reflection cracking completely. When rubblization technique is applied, the upper layer of aged concrete pavement is rubblized between 40mm-70mm in depth. However, the lower layer is typically rubblized more than 100mm in depth. Nevertheless, it is difficult to turn the entire concrete pavement of more than 30cm in depth into rubblized aggregate of appropriate size. Thus, a simulation experiment was carried out to find the appropriate rubblized depth, which avoids the reflection cracking and still maintains the function of subbase, by varying the depth of rubblized depth in loom increments of 0cm, 10cm, and 20cm. The result indicated the optimum rubblized depth was 10cm (Lee, 2006). Additionally, a small rubblizinge equipment was developed in order to derive the rubblization technique appropriate for thick concrete pavement. This equipment was tested out on an experimental pavement, which was constructed with the same standard and specification for the road in actual use, by varying its rubblizing head shape and energy as well as the effective area of rubblization. This experiment led to a prototype equipment for rubblization of thick concrete pavement. The prototype was put into use on a highway, undergoing a test construction and monitoring afterwards. This entire process was necessary for the validation of the proposed rubblization technique.