Planned intervention: On Wednesday April 3rd 05:30 UTC Zenodo will be unavailable for up to 2-10 minutes to perform a storage cluster upgrade.
Published November 4, 2013 | Version 9996836
Journal article Open

Evaluation of the FWD Moduli of a Flexible Pavement Using Finite Element Model

Description

This study evaluates the back calculation of stiffness of a pavement section on Interstate 40 (I-40)in New Mexico through numerical analysis. Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) test has been conducted on a section on I-40. Layer stiffness of the pavement has been backcalculated by a backcalculation software, ELMOD, using the FWD test data. Commercial finite element software, ABAQUS, has been used to develop the Finite Element Model (FEM) of this pavement section. Geometry and layer thickness are collected from field coring. Input parameters i.e. stiffnesses of different layers of the pavement are used as the backcalculated ones. Resulting surface deflections at different radial distances from the FEM analysis are compared with field FWD deflection values. It shows close agreement between the FEM and FWD outputs. Therefore, the FWD test method can be considered to be a reliable test procedure for evaluating the in situ stiffness of pavement material.

Files

9996836.pdf

Files (4.1 kB)

Name Size Download all
md5:7f992ac060dcf99582d67ae1b0692cba
4.1 kB Preview Download

Additional details

References

  • Huang, Y. H. "Pavement Analysis and Design." 2nd Ed., 2004, Pearson Prentice Hall, Pearson Education Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ.
  • Ahmed, M. U. and Tarefder, R. A. "2D and 3D Finite Element Modeling of FWD Deflection Basing of Airfield Pavements." Proceedings of the 13th International Conference of the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geo-mechanics, Melbourne, Australia, Paper: 1279, 2011.
  • Islam M. R., Ahmed, M. U., and Tarefder, R. A. (2012). "Performance Evaluation of the Embedded Sensors in I-40 Pavement in New Mexico." Proceedings of International Conference on Sustainable Design, Engineering & Construction (ICSDEC), ASCE. pp. 519-526.
  • Logan, D. L. "A First Course in the Finite Element Method." 4th Edition, 2007, Nelson, Thomson Canada Limited, Ontario, Canada.