Consideration of climate change in the mechanistic pavement design

Abstract

This paper is about a parameter study on the influence of climate change on pavement design using the linear-elastic multi-layer theory. An approach is presented considering every single hour of the design period for the calculation of traffic-induced and temperature-induced stresses and strains in the pavement structure. This is realised by bringing in line the time-variation curves of pavement temperatures and the corresponding time-variation curves of traffic load repetitions. This approach is especially suitable for studying the effect of temperature-related influence factors on the pavement design. As an example for application, a parameter study on the influence of climate change on pavement design is presented in this paper. For the example of different climates, it is investigated if the pavement design approach, which is applied for layer thickness design to resist bottom-up fatigue cracking, needs to be adopted when climate change is considered.