Precast concrete pavement units [raft units], reinforced with steel bars have been used for road pavement surfacing and for surfacing heavy duty industrial areas. The industrial areas included ports used for the trans-shipment of containers and storage areas for heavy industrial materials. With the use of raft units for aircraft hard standing and for temporary highways, the UK Ministry of Defence initiated research into their use for rapid runway repairs. Part of this research has been reported elsewhere, but another part led to further investigations. This paper reports on some of those further laboratory and numerical investigations and concludes that; fibre only reinforcement should not be used, increasing the amount of steel bar reinforcement increases raft unit life, increasing the raft unit thickness increases the raft unit life more than the design method predicts, the use of steel angle around the top edges of the raft unit increases raft unit life, and some form of uplift restraint on the raft unit should be added. Further, the way in which a movable load traverses the raft unit effects raft unit life and failure mechanisms.

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