Pavement Temperature Effects

Minnesota’s temperature changes over a wide range on a daily and a seasonal basis. Our roads are expected to perform without major distress over this range of temperature extremes. The effects of temperature cause thermal stress, warping and curling and joint design for Portland Cement Concrete (PCC), and freezing/thawing of moisture sensitive materials. Temperature is one of the most basic pieces of information needed to design a pavement. Temperature is used to specify Performance Grades (PG) for asphalt binders,
timing of spring load limits, base thickness for frost free design and modeling parameters for pavement performance and design. This report provides a summary of the various
temperature phenomena seen in select the pavement systems. All data is from the Minnesota Road Research Project (Mn/ROAD), located in south central Minnesota. All available data was not analyzed for this report, but rather a few selected cells were analyzed. Therefore, the temperature extremes may not be the exact maximum or minimum for all the cells that were monitored, but should be within a few degrees.