Evaluation of Pavement Preservation Treatments Used in Alaska

Pavement preservation is recognized as a means to a lower life cycle cost of a road asset; but, possibly not all surface distress data is documented and kept to further enhance a beneficial decision for the best treatment at the proper time. This paper presents a study to identify the types of treatments used in Alaska and how the treatments had performed. Forty-four road sections in Alaska that had received a pavement preservation treatment were surveyed in person along with data available from the AKDOT&PF. The PASER manual for asphalt roads was used to evaluate the distresses for the road sections. Different treatments provided varied improvement of pavement life, which is also consistent with the findings from parallel research efforts of literature and survey conducted by the research team. In addition, pavement failure modes in different regions of Alaska are different. The same pavement preservation treatments may be applied to different regions but to prevent or mitigate different failure modes. Use of some treatments (for example, chip seals) should be considered job-specifically. There is a need to create a pavement preservation database and keep good records of current and future pavement preservation projects for better evaluating and applying them.