Performance Evaluation of Flexible Pavements: A Case Study

Abstract

Flexible pavements get distress during their service life because of increase in traffic particularly commercial vehicles. The present study focuses on finding the increase of magnitude of deformations from 2008 to 2015 traffic data using ANSYS for which the BRTS stretch in Visakhapatnam is considering five locations along the stretch. The city of Visakhapatnam is situated on the north-east coasts of Andhrapradesh and it is one of the fastest growing cities in Asia and turning into a metropolis with rapid industrialization and tourism attractions. City of Visakhapatnam is the most protected natural harbour in India. Due to the presence of Eastern Naval Command, Steel plant, HPCL, the city has been the home to people from different parts of the country and the city is well connected with daily flights from Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore, Tirupati and Raipur. All these factors are leading to high growth of population in the city. Visakhapatnam has experienced high growth in population and the same trend is expected to continue over the next two decades. With high growth of population, there is an increasing number of road users and leading to more number of vehicles. Pavements are designed to carry estimated loads during their service life but they get distress due to heavy growth of commercial vehicles. A typical flexible pavement cross section comprises of four layers namely surface course, base course, subbase course and subgrade layer. The heavy growth of traffic will distress the flexible pavement in the form of rutting. Rutting is one of the major distresses observed in flexible pavements. The figure1 shows the rutting failure in flexible pavements.