Fatigue life analysis of bituminous pavement for different material properties and axle configurations

Abstract

Fatigue and rutting are the major distress in the flexible pavement that occur when the strains at the bottom of the asphalt layer and top of the subgrade layer exceeds the allowable value. It becomes important for the pavement design engineers to perform analysis on the pavement structure in the fatigue and rutting distresses. There are many factors influences the distress in the pavement structure and few are traffic characteristics, material properties, and environmental conditions. The influence of material properties and temperature becomes major area of interest on the behaviour of pavement structure. This project attempts to study the influence of material properties and axle configurations in the temperature range of fatigue regime (-10 °C to 20 °C) on the behaviour of different pavement cross section. It also aims to investigate the fatigue life of pavement structure on the varying parameters.In this study, the pavement cross section is considered for three different CBR (California Bearing Ratio) values and the horizontal tensile strain is determined by using Pavement analysis software. The influence of material properties such as modulus of elasticity, Poisson's ratio of bituminous mixture is analysed. The effect of single axle and tandem axle configurations at low and high fatigue temperatures were investigated. Further the efficacy of pavement structure was evaluated for varying material properties and axle configuration in the low and high fatigue temperatures. This study will further help in optimizing the pavement structure for different site conditions.