RESEARCH ARTICLE
Deicer Impacts on Pavement Materials: Introduction and Recent Developments
Xianming Shi*, 1, 2, Michelle Akin1, Tongyan Pan1, Laura Fay1, Yajun Liu 1, Zhengxian Yang 1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 3
First Page: 16
Last Page: 27
Publisher ID: TOCIEJ-3-16
DOI: 10.2174/1874149500903010016
Article History:
Received Date: 25/11/2008Revision Received Date: 24/12/2008
Acceptance Date: 30/12/2008
Electronic publication date: 19/2/2009
Collection year: 2009
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
A review of the impacts of deicers used in winter maintenance practices of Portland cement concrete and asphalt concrete roadways and airport pavements is presented. Traditional and relatively new deicers are incorporated in this review, including sodium chloride, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride, calcium magnesium acetate, potassium acetate, potassium formate, sodium acetate, and sodium formate. The detrimental effects of deicers on Portland cement concrete exist through three main pathways: 1) physical deterioration such as salt scaling; 2) chemical reactions between deicers and cement paste (a cation-oriented process, especially in the presence of magnesium chloride and calcium chloride); and 3) deicers aggrevating aggregate-cement reactions (such as the anion-oriented process in the case of chlorides, acetates, and formates affecting alkali-silica reactivity and the cation-oriented process in the case of calcium chloride and magnesium chloride affecting alkali-carbonate reactivity). The deicer impacts on asphalt concrete pavements had been relatively mild until acetate- and formate-based deicers were introduced in recent years. The damaging mechanism seems to be a combination of chemical reactions, emulsifications and distillations, as well as the generation of additional stress in the asphalt concrete.