In addition to highway and railway embankments, airport taxiway and runway embankments to be constructed on soils with low bearing capacity and high settlement potential can also be built using geofoam blocks (Figure 1). As with highway and railway embankment construction, geofoam technology can also be used for airport embankments designed to serve aircraft and motor vehicle traffic, making it possible to develop projects that offer advantages in terms of overall project cost and construction time without the need for ground improvement works.
There are a limited number of applications in which geofoam technology has been used in the construction of airport embankments. One of these applications is the project carried out at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in the state of Louisiana, USA (Figure 2). In this project, geofoam blocks were used both for the rehabilitation of an existing runway embankment and for the construction of a new runway embankment on highly compressible soils without any ground improvement treatment.
