White Topping Overlay for Rehabilitation of Bituminous Roads

Abstract

Concrete overlays have been used to rehabilitate both the existing bituminous (flexible) pavement since 1918 and existing concrete pavement since 1913. Whitetopping in its various forms have been used in the USA and Europe on Airports, Inter-state roads, Primary & Secondary Highways, Local Roads, Streets and Parking lots to improve the performance, durability and riding quality of deteriorated bituminous pavement surfaces. There has been a renewed interest in whitetopping, particularly, in Thin & Ultra Thin Whitetopping during the last decade. This has been possible due to several successful high profile projects executed in USA and Europe. Their effectiveness has further renewed interest in them because they satisfy the demand caused by rapidly deteriorating highways confronted with limited fund availability. Whitetopping of all types, viz; Conventional Whitetopping, Thin Whitetopping (TWT) and Ultra Thin Whitetopping (UTWT) offer immense potential as a rehabilitation strategy for Indian roads. Several successful projects have been executed at Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Nagpur, Jaipur and Bangalore in the last few years. The performance of these sections has been found to be satisfactory. The paper discusses the design and construction aspects of TWT.