I-265 Ohio River Bridges Project

Challenge: The Ohio River Bridges project was a massive $2.3B transportation project in the Louisville metro area. The project involved new bridges and connecting highways with numerous grade crossings, 32 lane-miles of roadway and roughly 450,000 SY of concrete pavement. During construction, incomplete QC/QA data needed for acceptance of the pavement foundation construction along a 2-mile stretch of roadway began causing delays to the late fall paving program. Rapid deployment of a solution to verify the pavement foundation properties was needed to keep the project on schedule.

Solution: Ingios® Geotechnics’ engineers immediately launched into a review of pavement designs by working closely with the pavement designers to develop a methodology to translate design requirements to target field-values. The solution involved continuous mapping of the 2-mile stretch of prepared base-material using Ingios’ COMP-Score® RT (CRT) mapping; by retrofitting Contractor’s compactor at the site in less than one day.

An Automated Plate Load Testing (APLT) plan consisting of cyclic plate load tests using 18-inch and 30-inch diameter plates was used to measure in-situ composite resilient modulus values to provide site-specific calibration. Calibration testing demonstrated a regression coefficient R² > 0.9 for predicting resilient modulus using the CRT mapping results.

Benefits: CRT mapping provided continuous video recording of the results, as well as color-coded spatial mapping to display areas of compliance. Walsh Construction was alerted immediately to areas of non-compliance that did not meet the minimum pavement foundation design values and flagged for rework prior to paving. Results of the monitoring provided the

confidence for the design/build project team to address the localized areas and move forward with paving on the project that required a 2-year warranty and 30-year operation and maintenance requirement.