ANALYSIS OF THE FLEXIBLE PAVEMENT USING FALLING WEIGHT DEFLECTOMETER FOR INDIAN NATIONAL HIGHWAY ROAD NETWORK

Abstract

The foremost requirement for developing efficient pavement maintenance and management strategies is to ascertain the properties of the pavement material and its structural capacity. This can be done by studying the response of the pavement to the applied load. In this study, the Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) and KGPBACK were used to evaluate the performance of a road section of the National Highway in the state of Haryana in India by studying the deflection in response to the load applied at selected points on the highway. FWD was used to put a dynamic load on existing pavement and the response of the pavement to the load was measured. The deflection values thus obtained were used in the KGPBACK software to determine the elastic moduli of the modelled layers of the pavement. The in-situ elastic moduli obtained were further used in IITPAVE software for overlay design of the pavement. Data obtained from the study was also used as the input parameter in the HDM-4 model to predict the deterioration of the pavement with time due to the prolonged application of traffic loads. The HDM-4 model was also used to check the effect of bituminous overlay maintenance on the distress models and all four distress (cracking, ravelling, rutting and roughness) were found to decrease. Therefore, the study provided in this paper presents a guideline methodology that could be used by administrators in order to estimate when and how much of funding would require to preserve and maintain the Indian Highway road network.