Economic Evaluation of Cement Grouted Bituminous Mixes for Airport Pavements

The Cement Grouted Bituminous Mix (CGBM) is an innovative material that could be used to build airport pavements subjected to heavy concentrated loads or fuel and solvent leaks. CGBM is composed of a porous asphalt clogged with an expansive cement mixture, which fills the asphalt voids. This paper focuses on two airport pavements (i.e., a taxiway and a helipad one) to be paved in an Italian airport. For each surface, the construction and maintenance costs of a CGBM pavement and a traditional flexible pavement have been compared. The pavements should bear different traffic loads, while the weather, subgrade, and materials are the same: the fatigue and rutting verification gives structures whose cost analysis leads to different results. The CGBM solution for the taxiway has a cost comparable to that of the equivalent traditional flexible pavement (i.e., 73.87 €/m(2) vs. 73.20 €/m(2) during the service life). On the other hand, the overall discounted cost of the helipad surface paved with CGBM is higher than that obtained for the traditional pavement (i.e., 82.4 €/m(2) vs. 67.5 €/m(2)). Therefore, the study demonstrates that the economic opportunity of CGBM solutions strongly depends on traffic loads.