Remaining Pavement Life Computation Using Cumulative Damage Factor

Input values used in existing airfield pavement design methods are all assumed to be consistent for 20 years of their whole pavement design life without allowing for any potential changes during the pavement life. This paper presents research efforts the Naval Facilities Engineering and Expeditionary Warfare Center (NAVFAC EXWC) made to characterize pavement damages caused by traffic condition changes such as emerging new aircraft types with excessive stresses that were not considered in the original pavement design. Selected military aircraft operations under the expeditionary environments were implemented by the California Bearing Ratio (CBR) design method in the US Department of Defense (DoD) Pavement Computer Assisted Structural Engineering (PCASE) program to characterize pavement damages which has been adopted for civilian airport pavement design as well. A procedure was developed to estimate in-service airfield pavement damages under given aircraft operations in expeditionary (military) and overload (civilian) environments and adopted for remaining pavement life computations.