Laboratory Investigations and Field Implementation of Pervious Concrete Paving Mixtures

Pervious concrete (PC) is a sustainable concrete material that is being used as a strategy for reducing stormwater-related runoff and recharging ground water. As part of a smart cities initiative of the Government of India, pervious concrete pavement (PCP) mixtures were studied in the laboratory for different properties and implemented in the field to function as parking lots and walkways. A labor-based methodology was used in the construction of eighteen PC slabs encompassing six different mixtures. The construction practices followed were rational and demonstrated to the field engineers how to carry the technology further. The field-produced mixtures had higher porosity and lower density compared to laboratory mixtures. The infiltration capacities (IC) of field PC slabs were similar to those determined in the laboratory. The single-sized graded mixtures depicted lower IC compared to the mixtures with graded aggregates, which was attributed to thicker cement paste coating in single-sized aggregates, while the mixtures with lower cement-to-aggregate ratio depicted higher IC. The coring procedure resulted in a loss of aggregates that may have provided erroneous values of the in-situ properties, and hence, a methodology is deemed essential to investigate the in-situ characteristics using nondestructive techniques. In the future, the differences in the porosity between field and laboratory mixtures should be accounted for in order to avoid an overestimation of the PC properties and to achieve rational designs of PCP as most of the properties are dependent upon porosity.