Chapter 21

Permeable Concrete

Abstract Permeable concrete is the concrete containing interconnected voids

inside to allow air or water moving through it. The fundamental material charac-
teristic of permeable concrete is its open pore structure (primarily the connected
porosity and the larger pore sizes), which is caused by gap-graded coarse aggregates
and little to minimal amounts of fine aggregates. Water is easy to percolate through
paving matrix into the subsoil beneath when permeable concrete is utilized as
paving material. Permeable concrete is beneficial for conserving storm water and
recharging groundwater, thus can be used to absorb the noise of vehicles and adjust
the temperature and humidity of the Earth’s surface.

Keywords Concrete
Permeable
Coarse aggregates
Binders
Voids

21.1 Introduction

With the population growth and the continual urbanization, cities are being covered
with the impermeable concrete surface areas such as residential and commercial
buildings. Because of the lack of water and air permeability of the traditional
concrete pavements, the storm water is not filtered underground leading to rapidly
increase of the runoff. Therefore, the drainage system gets overloaded. In addition,
for the impermeable concrete surface, it is difficult for soil to exchange heat and
moisture with air. As a result, the temperature and humidity of the Earth’s surface
cannot be adjusted. This phenomenon commonly called urban heat islands has led
to thermal discomfort for urban dwellers, which has prompted the consumption of
additional electricity for cooling purposes and increased CO2 emissions. The
construction of conventional impermeable pavement systems has caused two major
shifts in the local environment: (1) changes in the hydrological aspects and
(2) variations in the surrounding thermal ambience. At the same time, the plash on
the road during a rainy day reduces the safety of drivers and passengers. In order to
decrease the effect of high-impact development, several researchers have focused
on implementation of sustainable materials and eco-friendly strategies that result

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 359

B. Han et al., Smart and Multifunctional Concrete Toward Sustainable
Infrastructures, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4349-9_21
360 21 Permeable Concrete

in low-impact development. Many investigations have attempted to increase the

permeability of concrete by reducing or even eliminating the use of fine aggregates
in concrete to increase the number and size of pores in the concrete. Permeable
concrete has become a suitable candidate due to its structural, economical, and user
benefits.
This chapter will provide a systematical introduction to permeable concrete, with
attentions to its definition and principles, components, current progress, and
applications.

21.2 Definition and Principles of Permeable Concrete

Permeable concrete is an environmentally friendly composites consisting of cement

paste or asphalt and coarse aggregate, little or no fine aggregate, and water. In
permeable concrete, continuous porosity ranges from 15 to 35% and the presence of
interconnected large voids system allows the water flow easily through it. A model
for the structure of permeable concrete is shown in Fig. 21.1. The skeleton of
permeable concrete is formed by coarse aggregates, which are bound together by a
limited amount of cement paste or asphalt. Without the filling effect of fine
aggregate, plenty of open voids exist among coarse aggregates and the typical size
of voids ranges from 2 to 8 mm. There are many pores with diameters above 1 mm
inside the permeable concrete, so water can penetrate through the concrete quickly
[1, 2]. This special structure provides the concrete with an interconnected macro-
pore internal structure. The limited quantity or absence of fine aggregate in per-
meable concrete creates highly curvaceous voids that help to store storm water
within them and reduce runoff quantity in a scientific manner [3]. Permeability is
the most important performance characteristic of permeable concrete. As a porous

(a) (b)

Voids

Fig. 21.1 a model of permeable concrete; b schematic diagram of permeability

21.2 Definition and Principles of Permeable Concrete 361

Fig. 21.2 Porosity–

permeability relationships for
several permeable concretes.
Reprinted from Ref. [4],
Copyright 2010, with
permission from Elsevier

material, its transport properties are also inherently dependent on the pore structure
features. Figure 21.2 shows a compilation relationship between porosity and per-
meability from a few reported studies [4–8].

21.3 Components of Permeable Concrete

The aggregate gradation for the permeable concrete typically consists of discon-
tinuous gradation/single-sized coarse aggregates. The cement or asphalt is used to
cover and bind aggregates together. The porosity of a typical permeable concrete
varies in the range of 15–25%. The water-to-cement ratios as a very important
variable are in the range of 0.28–0.40, which are lower compared to those used in
the conventional concrete mix. The main intention of the low water-to-cement
ratios is to provide sufficient cement coating for the aggregates [9, 10]. Further, the
aggregate-to-cement ratio has been varied in the range from 4:1 to as high as 6:1.
Typically, the volume of aggregates in permeable concrete is about 50–65%, while
that of conventional concrete is about 60–75% [3].

21.3.1 Coarse Aggregates

In order to maintain sufficient voids in the concrete, permeable concrete is usually

made up of coarse aggregates with varying sizes in the range of 19–9.5 mm [3].
However, the compressive strength of concrete shows an adverse tendency with the
increase of porosity [11–13]. In order to balance the conflict of permeability and
compressive strength, the porosity of concrete is usually designed as 15–25% based
362 21 Permeable Concrete

Fig. 21.3 Relationship between strength, void ratio, and permeability for several trial mixes of
permeable concrete [14]

on the correlation between porosity and permeability, porosity and compressive

strength (as shown in Fig. 21.3) [14]. To improve the mechanical strength of
permeable concrete but still maintain its high porosity, the cement paste or asphalt
binder area should be increased. Smaller-sized aggregate is beneficial for increasing
the number of particles per unit volume of concrete. This can lead to the increases
of the specific surface of aggregate and the binding area, thus resulting in the
improved strength. As shown in Table 21.1, three different sizes of the aggregate
were used to fabricate the permeable concrete. It is obvious that the strength of
permeable concrete is relatively low due to its high porosity. When the mix pro-
portion and the apparent density of the concrete are approximately same, reducing
the aggregate size seems to increase the concrete strength. This may be attributed to
the fact that the smaller aggregate size may improve the strength of the interface
between the aggregate and cement paste or asphalt [13, 15]. In this case, several
studies have used coarse aggregates with the size of 2.36–9.5 mm to balance the
strength properties and water permeability. The compressive strength of concrete
locates in 2.8–28.0 MPa at 7 d and water permeability coefficient ranges from
0.2 to 5.4 mm/s [16].

Table 21.1 Properties of permeable concrete fabricated with aggregate in different sizes
Mixture Aggregate size W/C 28-day compressive Water penetration
number (mm) strength (MPa) coefficient (mm/s)
1 15–30 0.33 7.1 7.8
2 10–20 0.33 9.8 8.3
3 5–10 0.33 13.8 8.9
Reprinted from Ref. [13], Copyright 2002, with permission from Elsevier
21.3 Components of Permeable Concrete 363

21.3.2 Binders

Permeable concrete has been normally produced using ordinary Portland cement
and asphalt. The main function of the binding material is to provide sufficient
coating around the aggregates to increase the strength and durability of the per-
meable concrete. Based on the structure model in Fig. 21.1, the load will be
transferred to the aggregates by cement paste when the concrete is subjected
to loading. Although the strength of aggregate is high enough, the cement paste in
the interfacial transition zone (ITZ) is relatively weak. Using asphalt as binding
material also leads this issue. Therefore, the permeable concrete always fails at the
binding material in ITZ. In other words, cement paste or asphalt is an important
factor in permeable concrete design. Researchers have tried to enhance the strength
of cement binder and asphalt. Except for applying high-strength cement and
reducing water/cement ratio, supplementary materials, organic intensifiers, and
other special chemical reinforcing agents are usually used. In recent years, many
researchers have tried to develop permeable concrete by adding supplementary
materials such as silica fume [3, 13, 15].

21.4 Current Progress of Permeable Concrete

The concept of permeable concrete has been put forward for nearly 60 years. Since
the 1980s, permeable concrete has been widely used in parking lots, squares,
pedestrian walkways, and other areas with light traffic. In fact, the research of
permeable concrete is mainly focused on the various properties of the pores in it.
One of the significant challenges in porous material characterization is obtaining
relevant features of the three-dimensional pore structure from two-dimensional
images. Geometrical-statistical methods (also called stereology) are generally
applied for this purpose [17]. Figure 21.4 shows representative planar images of

Fig. 21.4 Two-dimensional images of planar sections from pervious concretes proportioned with
a 2.36mm, b 4.75mm, and c 9.5mm maximum-size aggregates. Reprinted from Ref. [4], Copyright
2010, with permission from Elsevier
364 21 Permeable Concrete

sections of permeable concrete made using three sizes of coarse aggregate [4]. The
complexities of the pore space in permeable concretes are evident from these
images. Even though the porosities are similar, the pores sizes, distributions, and
likely connectivity are very different. In these planar images, there are fewer and
larger “pores” in the specimen made with larger coarse aggregate. Neithalath et al.
found that permeable concrete filled with a conducting electrolyte (such as sodium
chloride solution) can be approximated as a medium with a single electrically
conducting phase (solid phase has a much lower conductivity as compared with the
electrolyte-filled pore space). Therefore, the concrete permeability can be visibly
realized through the concrete conductivity. They proposed that it is instructive to
examine the relative influence of porosity, pore size, and pore connectivity on the
permeability of permeable concrete (as shown in Fig. 21.5). Based on the above
studies, they got conclusions that very high porosities (typically more than
25–30%) are generally undesirable from a viewpoint of mechanical properties.
It has also been shown in an earlier study that higher porosities are not necessarily
required to obtain higher connectivity factors. It is suggested that the connectivity
factors can increase by selection of suitable aggregate gradations to obtain desirable
transport properties [4]. The effective volumetric porosities (/V) of the permeable
concrete mixtures were determined by using a commonly adopted procedure where
the mass of water required to fill a permeable concrete enclosed in a latex sleeve
was measured [18, 19] and then converted to an equivalent volume. The perme-
ability expressed by Darcy’s relationship is valid in laminar flow regime [20]. This
test determines the permeability coefficient under a constant load and variable load.
The constant head permeability is measured with the levels of 255 mm and the

Fig. 21.5 Relative influence

of relevant pore structure
features uv (porosity or pore
connectivity) and d2crit (pore
diameter  pore diameter) on
permeability. Reprinted from
Ref. [4], Copyright 2010, with
permission from Elsevier
21.4 Current Progress of Permeable Concrete 365

Fig. 21.6 Device for measuring the permeability coefficient of permeable concrete. Reprinted
from Ref. [1], Copyright 2014, with permission from Elsevier

falling head permeability is evaluated with an initial water level 255 mm and final
height 75 mm. The device for measuring permeability of permeable concrete is
shown in Fig. 21.6. Using the device in Fig. 21.6, Nguyen et al. observed that the
permeability of permeable concrete is 1.1 mm s−1 with variable head test and
0.8 mm s−1 with constant head test. The small permeability coefficients are con-
sistent with the small continuous porosity and the high compressive strength
[21–25]. They found that the variation of the permeability of permeable concrete is
inverse to the compressive strength but proportional to the porosity [1].

21.5 Applications of Permeable Concrete

The permeable concrete possesses many advantages such as flood protection and
drainage, noise reduction, and maintenance of the balance of urban soil ecological
environment; thus, it can be applied as follows: (1) Most cities of the developed
world rely on pipe network systems, which have frequently been developed in the
nineteenth century. Traditional systems capture storm runoff and subsequently
distribute it to nearby watercourses or sewer systems. Some of these systems have
become ineffective. Furthermore, they are usually very expensive. Through intro-
duction of the permeable concrete, the rainwater can quickly filter into ground.
366 21 Permeable Concrete

Then, the groundwater resources can renew in time. Recently, a UK building

material company named Lafarge Tarmac has developed a new type of permeable
concrete with crushed granite as coarse aggregate. This concrete is permeable
enough to let average 600 L/(min m2) water through to the ground level (as shown
in Fig. 21.7) [26]. (2) The management of runoff in urban areas has taken a ‘green’
approach due to the emergence of sustainable drainage systems constructed of
permeable concrete, which can collect, store, treat, redistribute, and recycle water.
In countries such as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, recycled water is used in the
development of ecosystems and landscapes. (3) As the permeable concrete pave-
ment is air permeable and water permeable, the soil underneath can be kept wet. It
improves the environment of road surface. (4) The permeable concrete pavement
can absorb the noise of vehicles, which creates quiet and comfortable environment.
In rainy days, the permeable concrete pavement has no plash on the surface and no
glisten at night. This improves the comfort and safety of drivers. (5) The permeable
concrete pavement has holes that can cumulate heat. Such pavement can adjust the
temperature and humidity of the Earth’s surface and decrease the phenomenon of
hot island in cities. (6) Through introduction of permeable concrete pavements, the
rainwater will be stored underneath on raining days and water vapor will be
released on sunny days. By using the property of the permeable concrete above, we
can transform cities to sponge eco-cities so as to enhance their capacity on flood
prevention, water resources replenishment, biodiversity development, and air
quality improvement [13, 27–29].

Fig. 21.7 Test of permeable concrete

21.6 Summary 367

21.6 Summary

Permeable concrete plays a key role in water purification and alleviating the drai-
nage burden of sewage system. The United States Environmental Protection
Agency has recognized the usage of permeable concrete as one of the best man-
agement practices in storm water conservation. In addition, the special porous
structure of permeable concrete generates excellent performance in anti-skid,
thermal insulation, and acoustic absorption, which makes permeable concrete
suitable for traffic system. However, the defects of poor mechanical strength and
freeze–thaw resistance need to be paid enough attention. Because of the limitation
of strength, the application of permeable concrete is still limited in heavy traffic
roads. Besides, the open voids of the permeable concrete structures prone to
clogging. Periodic cleaning or replace should be considered.

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