A study on the effects of non-uniform tyre inflation pressure distribution on rigid pavement responses

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Traffic data are one of the key elements required for the structural design and analysis of pavement structures. They are required for estimating the loads that are applied to a pavement and the frequency with which these given loads are applied throughout the pavement's design life. Typical traffic data required for the design are tyre characteristics and inflation pressure, which are used to calculate pavement responses using mechanistic models. One major assumption frequently associated with the mechanistic models is the uniform tyre–pavement contact stress distribution over a circular or rectangular contact area with the contact stress that is simply equal to the tyre inflation pressure. However, experimental measurements and recent studies have demonstrated that the actual tyre pavement contact stress (loading condition) is non-uniform and depends on the tyre construction, tyre load and tyre inflation pressure. The main objective of this study was to present a numerical procedure for modelling the non-uniformity of the tyre contact stress by utilising finite elements method in calculating the rigid pavement responses. The analysis was performed using non-uniform tyre–pavement contact stress conditions for different tyre load and inflation pressure values. Finally, a comparison was conducted between the two different contact stress distributions (uniform and non-uniform). The data generated from this study illustrated that there is a significant difference between the responses computed with uniform (the conventional assumption) and non-uniform contact stress distributions.