Recently developed Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) determines the probable total rutting by summing up the deformations of all layers of the trial pavement. If all distresses outcomes including rutting are within the specification the trial section is designed for construction. Therefore, vertical deformation (or strain) needs to be measured to validate the MEPDG for local c...

The principles underlying current mechanistic–empirical pavement design methods for fully flexible pavements have changed little in the past 30 years. They generally use linear elastic theory to determine the permissible strain at critical locations in the pavement structure to safeguard the road against excessive fatigue and structural deformation. These criteria are calibrated using performan...

This paper describes an analytic approach that can be used to evaluate and propose rehabilitation schedules based on economic, performance, and environmental considerations for various types of pavements managed by the Illinois State Tollway Authority. A mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) is formulated to model the agency’s life-cycle cost and environmental impacts where the decision set c...

The focus of the current project funded by MIOH-UTC for the period 9/1/2010-8/31/2011 is to enhance our earlier effort in providing a more robust image processing based pavement distress detection and classification system. During the last few decades, many efforts have been made to produce automatic inspection systems to meet the specific requirements in assessing distress on the road surfaces...

Heavy Weight Deflectometer (HWD) tests were routinely conducted on three Portland Cement Concrete (PCC) test items in the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA's) National Airport Pavement Test Facility (NAPTF) to verify the uniformity of the test pavement structures and to measure pavement responses during full-scale traffic testing. A six-wheel aircraft landing gear with dual-tridem configur...

Backanalysis or backcalculation of in-service pavement mechanical properties (such as elastic modulus) from pavement Non-Destructive Test (NDT) deflection data is a routine practice carried out by highway engineers for pavement structural condition evaluation, remaining life calculations, and mechanistic-based analysis. Owing to the complexity of this ill-conditioned inverse modeling problem, n...

The National Airport Pavement Test Facility (NAPTF) was constructed to generate full-scale testing data to investigate the performance of airport pavements subjected to complex gear loading configurations of new generation aircraft. During the first test program, the NAPTF test sections were simultaneously subjected to Boeing 777 trafficking in one lane and Boeing 747 trafficking in another lan...

Each year, more than 25 percent of highway fatalities in the United States occur at or near horizontal curves, according to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). In an attempt to save lives and prevent injuries, some 30 states across the U.S. are applying high friction surfaces (HFS) to improve skid resistance at locations with a high incident of vehicle crashes such as severe horizontal c...