Canada
Canada
Integrated Road Research Facility
The IRRF test road, established in 2012, is located in northeast Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and functions as the new access road to the Edmonton Waste Management Center (EWMC). The IRRF is a multimillion dollar partnership between the University of Alberta, Alberta Transportation, Alberta Recycling, and The City of Edmonton, with additional funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and Alberta Innovation and Advanced Education.
The IRRF is a unique research initiative committed to the evolution of sustainable roadway construction by investigating the use of recycled and waste materials in roadway projects. More than one million scrap tires were used to evaluate the feasibility of tire-derived aggregate (TDA) as embankment fill for pavement construction in cold regions. The IRRF also studies the performance of insulation materials, including bottom-ash and polystyrene, along with investigating the impact of environmental parameters such as temperature, moisture, and solar radiation on the pavement behavior.
The test road has two 20 m long monitoring sections approximately 100 m apart, which are thoroughly instrumented to study the road response to traffic and environmental loading. Full-scale instrumentation of the IRRF with Asphalt Strain Gauges (ASGs), Earth Pressure Cells (EPCs), and Soil Compression Gauges (SCG) has provided a comprehensive framework for analyzing the response of the pavement under heavy traffic loading.
Utilizing a state-of-the-art data collection system, the IRRF continuously collects data from more than 250 geotechnical and environmental pavement sensors embedded at different test sections and analyzes the results to monitor the road’s performance in Alberta’s extreme climate conditions.
Through the pursuit of research at the IRRF, valuable insight into innovative and advanced roadway projects will be gained, which is vital to the transportation industry.
Waterloo
