Stress behavior of concrete pavement

Abstract

Warping stresses and flexural stresses due to variation of thermal gradient and wheel load, respectively, cause cracking of rigid pavement. The distress in the pavement structure can be happened because of warping stresses induced by thermal gradient which causes curling effect due to temperature variation. The wheel load resulted flexural stresses which varies with the position and depends upon contact condition and repetition of load at a specific time interval. In the present study, a comparison of stresses of single layered rigid concrete pavement due to thermal load and wheel load have been done with varying slab thicknesses and modulus of subgrade reactions. The pavement has been modeled and analysed using SAP2000 finite element software. During modeling, the single layered rigid concrete pavements comprising of PQC has been considered without any joints at edges. The PQC slab has been considered with dense liquid foundation i.e. elastic. The self weight of pavement has been excluded in the analysis. It has been found that the interior thermal warping stresses are more sensitive with respect to slab thicknesses than modulus of subgrade reactions. It can also be stated that there is significant impact on stress behavior of the pavement due to combined effect of thermal gradient along with wheel load, especially for positive and negative thermal gradient considerations.