Advances in the Study of the Behavior of Full-Depth Reclamation (FDR) with Cement

Abstract

Road maintenance and rehabilitation are expected to meet modern society’s demands for sustainable development. Full-depth reclamation with cement as a binder is closely linked to the concept of sustainability. In addition to the environmental benefits of reusing the existing pavement as aggregate, this practice entails significant technical and economic advantages. In Spain, in the absence of tests specifically designed to determine the behavior of recycled pavements stabilized with cement, these materials are treated as soil-cement or cement-bound granular material. This assumption is not entirely accurate, because this recycled pavement contains some bituminous elements that reduce its stiffness. This study aimed to obtain the relationships between flexural strength (FS) and the parameters that describe the pavement behavior (long-term unconfined compressive strength (UCS) and indirect tensile strength (ITS)) and compare the findings with the relationships between these parameters in soil-cement and cement-bound granular materials. The results showed that the similar behavior hypothesis is not entirely accurate for recycled pavements stabilized with cement, because they have lower strength values—although, this is not necessarily an indication of poorer performance.