Modeling pavement damage and predicting fatigue cracking of flexible pavements based on a combination of deterministic method with stochastic approach using Miner’s hypothesis

Abstract

Distress in flexible pavements has been a problem in many countries due to the increase in road traffic and vehicle loads. One of the most important distress modes in the design of pavements is fatigue cracking. Despite the fact that there have been considerable efforts in recent years in fatigue performance evaluation and the design process of flexible pavements, there is still a need for further studies to overcome the difficulty in predicting fatigue cracking in terms of damage distribution considering the uncertainty associated with the input parameters of pavement life and traffic repetitions. The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology for modeling pavement damage and predicting fatigue cracking of flexible pavements based on a combination of deterministic method with stochastic approach using Palmgren–Miner’s hypothesis. Four predictive models are introduced and used in a comprehensive case study to estimate the fatigue life of the pavement surface layer. The solutions are obtained through numerical integration based on Gaussian quadrature method. The results reveal that pavement damage has a broad range of distribution in which the actual traffic load repetitions has a Poisson distribution, while the traffic repetitions to failure follows a lognormal distribution.