Expedient airfield runway repair using folded fibreglass mat

For expedient airfield runway repair, the US Air Force has developed a folded fibreglass mat to cover craters repaired with a well-compacted granular base material. The objective of this study was to evaluate the adequacy of using polymer plugs to anchor the mat to a repaired asphalt pavement for heavy aircraft operations. The effort consisted of materials testing, field experiments and analytical modelling. An 89,800-kg (198,000-pound) load cart having the footprint of a single C-5 main gear was pulled on a mat with wheels locked to simulate full braking forces. Anchor bushings were instrumented to measure anchor loads. A simplified numerical model was developed for anchor load analysis which has been validated against the load cart test data. The anchor system sustained the braking forces from all the load cart tests without failure. The polymer plug anchors have adequate vertical pull-out capacity to resist the uplifting force from the ‘bow wave’ formation of the mat. The polymer plug anchors also have adequate resistance to fatigue loads.