13000m2 CombiSlab Joint Free Container Pavement

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13000m2 CombiSlab Joint Free Container Pavement

Submitted by:  BOSFA

Owner:  Kirkpatrick Group

Consulting Engineer:  Day Consultants Ltd

Contractor:  Conslab Ltd

Summary:

The project requirements changed midway through construction and required a pavement design that could handle the additional heavy loads without any joints and for the slab to remain serviceable during its life.   

Conventional designs for these types of slabs use sawn joints to deal with early stresses and dowelled movement joints to cater for long term shrinkage.  For heavy container pavements like this, it can lead to complicated detailing and expensive joints that take time and effort to install correctly.  Even then there is no guarantee there won’t be uncontrolled cracking, which would have an undue effect on the slabs serviceability. 

The key factor of the innovation was to provide a continuously reinforced concrete pavement suitable for carrying the heavy design loads with controlled fine cracking instead of using expensive joints. 

Using a CombiSlab design approach allows the designer to assume the slab will crack and the tensile capacity provided by the steel fibres and mesh reinforcing can be used together very efficiently to design for very small controlled cracking.  This allows restraint to be taken into account, eliminates the need for expensive jointing, and reduces the amount of steel making it simpler to build and results in a more economic more durable concrete element.