NRMCA Attends Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, Files Report

The 102nd annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) was held last week in Washington, DC, with more than 11,000 transportation professionals, academics and industry officials in attendance - still below the pre Covid peak of 14,000 attendees. There were more than 5,000 presentations and over 530 sessions and workshops.

Several NCHRP projects in concrete materials are in progress and are expected to be completed by 2023, including Revision of AASHTO M 295 Standard Specification to Include Marginal and Unconventional Source Coal Fly Ashes; Improving Guidance of AASHTO R 80/ASTM C 1778 for Alkali-Silica Reactivity (ASR) Potential and Mitigation and Rating Concrete Water Permeability Based on Resistivity Measurements. NRMCA staff engineer Karthik Obla was a panelist for the first two NCHRP projects.

Multiple papers were presented on the following topics: low paste mixtures, new SCMs, UHPC, high ductility concrete containing fibers and performance-based concrete construction. There were discussions on performance of Type IL cements with committees planning a synthesis and a workshop on that topic for 2024. MnRoads is evaluating several new SCMs and low carbon solutions in 24 different pavement cells.

TRB committees organize technical sessions and workshops at the annual meeting; develop research needs statements and research synthesis topics. These are listed on the committee website and from time to time some projects are funded by NCHRP and other agencies. One such committee, AKP00 (2), Subcommittee of Sustainable Pavements and Resilience, organized a workshop titled Life‐Cycle Assessment (LCA) for Transportation Infrastructure. NRMCA Executive Vice President, Local Paving, Brian Killingsworth was a panelist for this workshop. Additionally, the committees discussed ways to attract a younger audience by encouraging them to develop short videos on their work and inviting selected speakers to present at the meeting. The 2024 TRB meeting will be held January 7-11.

For more information, contact NRMCA's Karthik Obla at kobla@nrmca.org.