HIGHWAY
MAINTENANCE
Prepared by: Engr. Cez Atup
HIGHWAY
MAINTENANCE
This is a challenge to the engineering
competence. The street and highway
network is a dynamic system subject to
environmental and operational influence. In
fact, the efficient highway maintenance is
extremely challenging management
problem.
Roads are exposed to tremendous loads that will sooner or later
leave their marks on them. A time will come when every road will
be in need of a general overhaul.
There are two types of
maintenance:
PREVENTIVE
BREAKDOWN
PREVENTIVE
An attempt is made to
anticipate potential failure and
to do something to prevent or
delay the failure.
BREAKDOWN
The failure has already occurred
and steps or measures must be
taken to determine and correct
the cause as well as to repair the
damage that has taken place.
Precast Pavement Sections
These have been developed to
provide prompt replacement of
localized sections of deteriorated
pavement with minimum
interference with flow of traffic.
The term highway maintenance covers a wide range of different
general activities which can be grouped together as follows:
Reactive Maintenance includes responding to inspections,
complaints or emergencies eg filling potholes, clearing and
making safe damage resulting from traffic accidents
Routine Maintenance includes surface patching work, cyclic
activities such as grass cutting, weed spraying, gulley cleaning,
road sweeping and maintenance of planted areas and trees
within the highway
Programmed Maintenance is normally carried out to a planned
schedule and includes surface dressing, resurfacing,
strengthening or reconstruction of roads or footways. It also
includes kerbing and road drainage improvement.
Causes of Failure of
Pavements
Failures in Flexible
Pavement
It is defined by the localized
depressions or settlements. The
depressions are normally followed
with heaving in the vicinity and the
sequence ultimately leads to the
formation of a wavy pavement surface.
Failures in Rigid
Pavements
Two main factors which are responsible for
failures in rigid pavements or cement
concrete pavements:
Deficiency of Pavement Materials
Structural Inadequacy
Scaling of rigid pavement simply means, peeling off or flaking
off of the top layer or skin of the concrete surface.
Shrinkage cracks develop on concrete surface during the
setting & curing operation. These cracks may form in
longitudinal as well as in transverse direction.
Joint spalling is the breakdown of the slab near edge of
the joint. Normally it occurs within 0.5 m of the joints.
When material present below the road slab ejects out
through the joints or cracks, it is called pumping.
Pumping can also lead to formation of cracks.
Pothole causes crash
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