Evaluation of Damage Potential for Pavements due to Overweight Truck Traffic

Higher allowable axle loads of multiaxle trucks produce severe pavement damage, which leads to raising the budget to rehabilitate deteriorated sections. To minimize expected damage, it is necessary to design pavement to support overweight truck traffic by evaluating damage potential based on accurate modeling of pavement response. In this study, an attempt was made to model base and subgrade layers as a stress-dependent cross-anisotropic material to assess pavement response using finite-element (FE) analysis. The prediction of vertical and radial stress of FE analysis matched reasonably well with the analytical solution and predictions from the commercial program CIRCLY. Using this modeling, equations correlating between critical strains and layer displacements, axle loading, offset distance, and layer moduli were established in order to evaluate accelerated damage potential due to overweight truck loadings. For each truck pair, the ratio of the service life consumed from one pass of the overweight truck to the corresponding service life consumed due to the passage of a legal truck was determined. As a result, all ratios were greater than 1, indicating greater potential for accelerated pavement deterioration on routes due to overweight truck use.