Studies on stress distribution in pavements subjected to surface shear forces

Abstract

It has been pointed out by some researchers1,2) that road pavements are subjected to vertical stress due to vehicles on them as well as shear stress at the time of braking or acceleration of vehicles. In this paper, the results of elastic analysis to obtain the rigorous solution for an elastic two-layer system subjected to surface shear stress are described and it is shown that the effect of shear stresses applied at the surface gives rise to fairly large stresses in the system. On the basis of these findings, the author attempts to explain why pavement failure takes place frequently at places such as crossings and curved parts where pavements are subjected to high magnitude of surface shear stresses.