Impact of Steel-fiber Reinforcement on Concrete Pavements Performance in the UAE

Concrete pavements structures have low tensile failure strain, due to their brittle behavior. This issue has been a main area of interest in the past decades. One of the widely studied method to resist transverse cracking in concrete pavements at low strain failures is the use of steel fibers. In this study AASHTOWare ME design software was used to assess the performance and feasibility of steel-fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC) pavements utilizing collected data from the literature with local traffic data and climate inputs of Sharjah, UAE. The analysis was conducted using different steel fibers contents. Using AASHTOWare simulations, the following distresses were quantified: Terminal International Roughness Index (IRI) (in/mile), Mean joint faulting (in) and Transverse cracking (% slabs) for two studied cases one with joint dowel and one without. The results have shown that increasing the steel fibers to 1.5%, improved IRI, mean join faulting and transverse cracking by 12.7, 1.6 and 47.5% for dowel case and 13.6, 15.4 and 47.5% in non-dowel cases. In addition, the results showed that adding steel fibers can increase the life of pavement up to 14 years.