Deicing chemicals and joint distress in concrete highway pavements of southern Kazakhstan: laboratory tests and a field survey
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Concrete highways built in southern Kazakhstan over the past decade show scaling, spalling and joint failures after a few winters of deicer use. This study combines four data sets to explain that distress. First, temperatures were recorded inside 100 mm concrete cubes held at -5°C after NaCl was applied to the iced surface: the surface fell to -14°C within 1 min, and the 8.9°C difference between the surface and 50 mm depth corresponds to an elastic thermal stress of 2.7–3.3 MPa, close to the direct tensile strength of pavement concrete. Second, concrete specimens were subjected to 30 wetting-drying cycles in water and four deicer solutions. Water and NaCl produced mass gains of 2.2% and 1.5%, whereas CaCl 2 , CaCl 2 with a nitrite-phosphate corrosion inhibitor and potassium acetate produced mass losses of 5.2%, 3.5% and 5.0%. Third, prisms of a dense silica-fume mortar (water/binder ratio 0.24) immersed in 5% NaCl reached a length change of 0.66 mm/m after 300 h, about twice that of sealed or air-cured companions. Fourth, a condition survey of six concrete highways found scaling, through-cracks, spalling and blow-ups; expansion joints were spaced 250–700 m apart against a design value of 50 m, and contraction joints were packed with deicing grit. Thirty joints monitored at km 181 of the Almaty-Shelek-Khorgos highway closed by 0.81 ± 0.94 mm on average, and two of them took 29% of the total closure. The results support restricting calcium-based and acetate deicers on these pavements, resealing joints before each summer, and restoring the designed expansion-joint spacing.
Source: Research Square
Authors: Galiya Assanova, Assel Nugmanova
Language: English
Subfield: Civil and Structural Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225641435
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