A critical issue concerning the deterioration of ageing road infrastructure all around the world is the need to rapidly and cost-effectively evaluate the present condition of pavement infrastructure. Non-Destructive Test (NDT) and evaluation methods are well-suited for characterizing materials and determining structural integrity of pavement systems. The Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) is a ...

This study aims to improve the accuracy of AASHTO Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) pavement performance predictions for Iowa pavement systems through local calibration of MEPDG prediction models. A total of 130 representative pavement sites across Iowa were selected. The selected pavement sites represent flexible, rigid, and composite pavement systems throughout Iowa. The req...

Road pavement maintenance today relies mainly on manual pavement condition inspection and distress rating; however, this manual method is costly, labour-intensive, time-consuming, and dangerous to inspectors and may affect traffic flows. Moreover, such method is very subjective and may have a high degree of variability, being unable to provide meaningful information. Additionally, since using t...

Conventional flexible pavements built on lime stabilized soils (CFP-LSS) were studied for the backcalculation of pavement layer moduli from nondestructive Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) testing. The validated ILLI-PAVE finite element program was used in pavement structural analyses by taking into account the effects of nonlinear layer modulus behavior, i.e., stress hardening for granular ma...

The AASHTO Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) pavement performance models and the associated AASHTOWare® Pavement ME Design software are nationally calibrated using design inputs and distress data largely from the national Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP). Further calibration and validation studies are necessary for local highway agencies’ implementation by taking into acc...

Assumption of a linear elastic system under static loading is questionable for structural response analysis of pavement-subgrade systems under dynamic nondestructive testing and moving wheel loads, especially if a deteriorated pavement is under study. Presented are the results of a parametric study using the three-dimensional finite element ABAQUS code; it investigates the effects of pavement d...

Many agencies use the AASHTO Guide for Design of Pavement Structures to design their pavement systems. The limitation inherent in this method is the empirical nature of the decision process, which was derived from a road test conducted almost 45 years ago in Ottawa, Illinois. The newly released Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG), based on NCHRP Study 1-37A, has adopted a mechan...