WHITE TOPPING ON ROAD PAVEMENTS

- Aslam Jalaludeen

Abstract

In India most of the roads are asphalt concrete, which have

short life because of failures in the form of fatigue cracking, rutting and early signs of
distress. These distresses get more pronounced in hot climatic regions like India as bitumen
is highly sensitive to temperature.White topping is a rehabilitation treatment on asphalt
concrete roads. It is defined as Plain Cement Concrete(PCC) overlay on asphalt concrete. It
provides a new innovative method of rehabilitation at a very low cost with very good
results and low maintenance cost. Plain Cement Concrete(PCC) is known to be relatively
stiffer and less sensitive to high temperature which gives better performance against rutting
and cracking and also in terms of rehabilitation and repair. White topping over the
bituminous pavement provides better durability, strength and additional life of 20-30
years.This method of rehabilitation/strengthening can be adopted for rural road networks
and district roads as these roads have low to moderate traffic. Even on the State Highways
and some recently declared National Highways, where traffic is moderate, the above
method of strengthening has a lot of promise. By adopting proper construction methods, we
can rehabilitate a large network of roads at reasonable cost and we get additional long life.

Keywords : White Topping, Asphalt concrete overlay, ultra thin white topping, thin white
topping, bituminous overlay