Assessing Pavement Surface Deflections in the South Central States with Software Simulations

The surface deflection bowl data collected through Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) has been widely utilized by various Department of Transportation (DOTs) in the South Central States and other places. The primary purpose of using deflection-based NDTs in network-level assessment is to identify a weak pavement section that requires further analysis at the project level. The falling weight deflectometer (FWD) test is one of the common NDT based tests utilized by highway agencies in assessing the performance of the flexible pavement. This study focuses on simulating the deflection obtained from FWD devices with the help of a simple yet comprehensive software 3-D Move Analysis. The need for extensive FWD testing in the field will be reduced with software-based simulations. Ninety-seven pavement sections from the state of Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas are utilized in the study for the simulation, analysis, and verification of FWD testing. 3D-Move Analysis was utilized to simulate the surface deflection obtained from the FWD test. It was found that the deflection values obtained through the software simulations were highly correlated with the field test results. Furthermore, the simulated deflection values can be utilized efficiently in future analyses to monitor the pavement conditions.