A Bio-Wicking System to Mitigate Capillary Water in Base Course

Water within pavement layers is the major cause of pavement deteriorations. High water content results in significant reduction in soil’s resilient behavior and increase in permanent deformation. Conventional drainage systems can only drain gravity water but not capillary water. Both preliminary lab and field tests have proven the drainage efficiency of a newly developed H2Ri geotextile with wicking fabrics. This bio-wicking system aims at resolving the potential issues that the original design may encounter: (1) H2Ri ultraviolet degradation, (2) H2Ri mechanical failure, (3) loss of drainage function under high suction, and (4) clogging and salt concentration. Both elemental level and full-scale test results indicated that the bio-wicking system is more effective in draining capillary water within the base courses compared with original design, in which the geotextile is directly exposed to the open air. However, a good drainage condition is required for the bio-wicking system to maintain its drainage efficiency. Accumulation of excess water will result in water re-entering the road embankment. Moreover, grass root and geotextile share the same working mechanism in transporting water. In the proposed bio-wicking system, the relatively smaller channels in the grass roots further ensures water moving from H2Ri geotextile, transporting through the stems of grass, and eventually evapo-transpiring into the air at the leaf-air interfaces. In sum, the bio-wicking system seemed to successfully address the concerns in the preliminary design and is a more efficient system to dehydrate the road embankment under unsaturated conditions.TenCate Geosynthetic

A Bio-Wicking System to Prevent Frost Heave in Alaskan Pavements: Phase II Implementation

Water within pavement layers is the major cause of pavement deterioration. High water content results in significant reduction in soil’s resilient behavior and an increase in permanent deformation. Especially in cold regions, frost heave and thaw weakening cause extensive damage to roads and airfields. Conventional drainage systems can only drain gravity water not capillary water. Both preliminary lab and field tests have proven the drainage efficiency of a newly developed H2Ri geotextile with wicking fabrics. In this report, continuous research was conducted to verify the effectiveness of the wicking fabric in mitigating frost boil issues in Alaskan pavemnets. Two test sections were selected at two low volume roads on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Soil moisture and temperature sensors were installed within the road embankments. The monitored data was used to analyze the soil migrations and evaluate the drainage performance of the wicking fabric. Preliminary monitoring results showed that the wicking fabric was effective in mitigating the frost boil problem

Symbol-Based Successive Cancellation List Decoder for Polar Codes

Polar codes is promising because they can provably achieve the channel capacity while having an explicit construction method. Lots of work have been done for the bit-based decoding algorithm for polar codes. In this paper, generalized symbol-based successive cancellation (SC) and SC list decoding algorithms are discussed. A symbol-based recursive channel combination relationship is proposed to calculate the symbol-based channel transition probability. This proposed method needs less additions than the maximum-likelihood decoder used by the existing symbol-based polar decoding algorithm. In addition, a two-stage list pruning network is proposed to simplify the list pruning network for the symbol-based SC list decoding algorithm.Comment: Accepted by 2014 IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS

Resilient Modulus Characterization of Alaskan Granular Base Materials

INE/AUC 11.0