Comparative Study of Jointed Plain Concrete Pavement (JPCP) Design Methodologies in China and United States

The pavement design specifications in China are mechanistic based with limited capabilities of performance prediction. In the US, the various editions of the AASHTO Guide for Design of Pavement Structures were developed based on the results from the 1960's AASHO Road Test and a number of studies in the following decades. Since 2002, the US pavement design standard has progressed to a mechanistic-empirical method, known as the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG), which is expected to replace the current AASHTO Guide released in 1993. In this paper, a comparative study of Jointed Plain Concrete Pavement (JPCP) design methodologies in China and US is presented. The design outputs designed based on the Chinese JPCP pavement specification are then used in the MEPDG design software to predict the pavement performances during their design lives. The findings of this study show that the new MEPDG has advantages in several aspects over the Chinese design procedure. It also demonstrates that the new MEPDG procedure is applicable in China to establish a general pavement design method and may be helpful to ease the frequently occurring premature failure problems of pavements in China.