PAVESCAPE Concrete for Low Volume Traffic Pavements
P. C. Sharma, (Retd.) Head Material Science, SERC (G), Technical Advisor AES; Suneet Gupta, Head–Strategic Marketing; Dr. C. Ramesh Babu, Research Analyst, AHLCON Engineering Services, AES New Delhi
Introduction
Due to the tremendous development in the infrastructure, major cities in India are getting covered with buildings and impermeable concrete. Concreting everywhere leads to environmental issues such as reduction in the recharge of rainwater into ground-hence constant fall of water table, formation of hot islands which makes the life at major cities miserable. The solution to minimize this problem is by installing pervious concrete pavements instead of impervious concrete or asphalt pavements for low volume traffic areas.
PAVESCAPE Concrete – Which is a modified pervious concrete developed at R&D Centre of AHLCON Engineering Services, is a special type of concrete obtained by a combination of specially formulated mixture of cement, water and open graded coarse aggregate. Typically, it has little to no fine aggregate content and has just enough cementitious paste to coat the aggregate particles while maintaining the interconnectivity of the voids. The void content in the pervious concrete is in the range of 15 to 22% compared to three to five percent in conventional concrete pavements. It has the ability to percolate the water underneath. It also reduces the runoff from paved areas, which reduce the need for separate drainage for storm water. PAVESCAPE concrete is highly suitable for warm weather climates and areas with native permeable subgrades.
PAVESCAPE concrete is also known as porous concrete, permeable concrete, gap-graded concrete, enhanced-porosity concrete, no-fines concrete and zero-fines concrete. While PAVESCAPE concrete can be used for a surprising number of applications, its primary use is in pavement construction. It is used mainly for low traffic areas such as parking lots, residential roads, driveways and footpaths.
The history of PAVESCAPE concrete dates back to 1852 in England with the construction of residential houses and it became considerably more widespread during the material shortages after World War II, for cast in place load bearing walls of single & multistoried buildings. The use of PERVIOUS concrete in pavement applications had started in US and Japan since 1980s. Since then a lot of research has been done on pervious concretes in developed countries like US and Japan and it has been extensively used in field.
