Asphalt mixes with asphalt rubber have been widely employed in highway pavements. However, their use is much less common in airport runways. This paper proposes a design method for rehabilitation of PCC airport pavements with asphalt rubber overlays.
In the case of the Foronda Airport in Vitoria, Spain, the runway is 3.5 km long and its pavement is constructed from PCC slabs. There are partial breaks in some of the slabs and signs of fatigue have appeared around the contact points. The region has a intermediate climate, with temperatures as low as -1 oC in the winter.
Several alternatives were suggested for use as the overlay. In the end, 10 cm of bituminous mixes with asphalt rubber were added. This article presents an overlay design procedure
based on the FAARFIELD (Federal Aviation Administration Rigid and Flexible Iterative Elastic Layered Design) program, combined with a method of thickness reduction previously applied only to highways. The application of this methodology generated a thickness of 10 cm, which corresponds to the thickness of the overlay with which the runway was actually reinforced, making the Vitoria airport an important case study.