Abstract
In recent years, the effect of overinflated tyre pressure and increased heavy vehicles’ axle load on flexible pavements has become a subject of great concern because of the higher stress levels induced and damage caused to road pavements. This paper aims to evaluate the effect of variable tyre inflation pressures (using actual tyre contact/footprint area) to determine the responses of flexible pavement. A full scale experiment was conducted on a heavy vehicle with 1:1:2 axle configuration, 10 R 20 tyre size and attached trailer with constant axle load. Measurements were made for actual tyre-pavement contact area. KENPAVE linear elastic program was then used to analyse the effects of the measured actual tyre-pavement contact area and the results was compared using conventional circular tyre contact area. A comparative analysis was then made between the actual contact area and the conventional circular tyre contact area. It was found that high tyre inflation pressure produce smaller contact area, giving more detrimental effect on the flexible pavement. It was also found that the temperature of tyres when the heavy vehicles are operational give less significant impact on tyre inflation pressure for the Malaysian climate.
Highlights
The Government of Malaysia currently spends a substantial amount of money to maintain and rehabilitate road pavements
This paper aims to evaluate the effect of variable tyre inflation pressures to determine the responses of flexible pavement
The quadratic form models during the morning session for both the right hand side (RHS) tyre and left hand side (LHS) tyre gave r2 value of above 0.9 for all measurements of the tyre contact area when the tyre was deflated from 1014 kPa (147 psi) to 339 kPa (49 psi) (Figure 1)
Summary
The Government of Malaysia currently spends a substantial amount of money to maintain and rehabilitate road pavements. Heavy vehicles’ overloading is one of the major factors contributing to pavement damage, in addition to other factors such as poor road construction and effect of the environment [1] [2]. As a consequence to the heavy vehicles’ overloading, most of the truck operators increased the tyre inflation pressure to reduce tyre wear and tear increasing the life of the heavy vehiclestyres. A study on the detrimental effect of increasing tyre inflation pressure on the flexible pavement is important for designing flexible pavement structures. A vehicle’s loading is transferred to the pavement structure through the tyres. The interface between the tyre and pavement is generally assumed to be circular contact area and the relationship between tyre inflation pressure and contact area is given by following formula [3]: MATEC Web of Conferences p
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