Finite Element Sensitivity Analysis of Permanent Deformation under Accelerated Loading

A recently completed accelerated pavement testing (APT) experiment conducted at the Louisiana Pavement Research Facility indicated that the majority of APT test sections failed due to excessive surface permanent deformation or rutting. A finite element (FE) analysis model was developed to predict the APT rutting development through a modified elastic-plastic model developed in this study. With a reasonably good agreement obtained between the FE predicted and APT field measured rutting results, a sensitivity analysis was performed on the built FE model to investigate how the prediction results would be affected by various input parameters. A statistics-based Taguchi method was employed to design an orthogonal array matrix in the analysis with six influential variables.