Study on the Effect of Wheel Load and Temperature on Rutting Damage of Composite Flexible Pavement Using Finite Element Method

Abstract

AbstractRutting is a significant type of damage that reduces the serviceability of flexible pavements. The main reasons for rutting are the loss of stiffness of the asphalt mix as a result of high temperature in the pavement surface and densification under repetition of heavy wheel loads. As a result, depressions are created on the pavement surface in the wheel path under heavy traffic loads. Most of the existing studies have focused on predicting the rutting failure due to heavy wheel loads only. However, the effect of environmental temperature on rutting failure is not explored much in literature. Hence, the present work makes an effort to investigate the influence of pavement temperature, in addition to the impact of wheel loads on rutting failure of the pavement. For this purpose, a finite element model of flexible pavement is simulated, where, in addition to the conventional layers, an extra inter-layer membrane is also introduced across the pavement thickness. In order to study the critical strain and deflection, a three-dimensional finite element model formulated with ANSYS software is used for the analysis. Under the application of static loading, linear material parameters for the asphalt layer, WMM base, and granular sub-base are characterized, and the subgrade is simulated by Drucker Prager non-linearity. Rubber asphalt composite having 1cm thickness is used as interlayer and the thickness of pavement layers is used according to the provision of Indian Roads Congress (IRC: 37-2018). The result prediction of rutting failure shows realistic responses when the effect of temperature is considered. With increasing pavement surface temperature, the maximum number of repetitions required to cause rutting decreases. Furthermore, the combination of temperature and wheel loading model yields a higher damage induced maximum number of repetitions than the finite element model of wheel load.KeywordRuttingFlexible pavementWheel loadTemperatureRubber asphalt composite