Abstract
Field experiments are performed in which Fuel Consumptions (FCs) are measured by operating passenger car over thirteen one-mile roadway sections at two highway speeds in Florida. The sections are composed of 6 flexible pavement sections and seven rigid pavement sections with varied pavement surface conditions and testing temperature. The first objective is to capture the fuel differences between flexible pavement and rigid pavement considering the effect of pavement roughness and pavement temperature. By ANalysis of COVAriance (ANCOVA), results show less fuel is consumed on rigid pavement opposed to flexible pavement by 2.25% at 93 km/h and 2.22% at 112 km/h. Fuel differences are found statistically significant at 95% Confidence Level (C.L.). Fuel savings on rigid pavement exhibits good agreement with authors’ Phase I direct comparison field study. Furthermore, fuel data from flexible pavement is applied to calibrate the Highway Development and Management IV (HDM-4) FC model in order to detect and quantify the impact of pavement deflection on FC. Calibrated models are evaluated and validated with experiment data. By results, the deflection-indhuced fuel effect is disclosed by the positive deflection adjustment coefficient generated from the calibration. It is also found that an increase of 0.1mm in pavement deflection at 25 °C (pavement temperature) would increase the FC by 1.53% at 93 km/h and 1.46% at 112 km/h. Results demonstrate good agreement with other findings.
Highlights
Oil crises, which frequently occurred during the past decades, have been resulting in decreased public spending on road maintenance and rehabilitation (Formby 2014)
This study aims to bring real-life experiment data to detect the impact of pavement type on Fuel Consumptions (FCs) and explore how pavement deflection affect passenger car FC with the local roadway, environment and highway traffic condition
Responds to the first research question raised at beginning of this paper: by experiment, rigid pavement again shows less FC and better fuel efficiency compared to flexible pavement
Summary
Oil crises, which frequently occurred during the past decades, have been resulting in decreased public spending on road maintenance and rehabilitation (Formby 2014). Considerable efforts have been made to improve vehicle design in order to enhance vehicle fuel efficiency (IEA 2012). It is important to focus on the efficiency of vehicle on the roads, but to the roadway/pavement itself for the fuel economy improvement, safety enhancement and emission reductions. One of the efforts made by researchers can be found such as the studies of Dell’Acqua et al (2013) and De Luca et al (2011) who prove that the optimization design of highway alignment consistency would decrease the number of crashes significantly. Pavement surface condition, described by roughness and texture, has been shown significant effect on vehicle/tire rolling resistance and fuel economy
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