Using Sensitivity Evaluations for Studying Multiple Slabs Concrete Pavement’s Critical Responses Associated with Top-down and Bottom-up Cracking

The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) rigid pavement design specification employs the NIKE3D-FAA software engine to compute critical pavement responses of concrete airport pavement structures. The NIKE3D-FAA is a fully implicit three-dimensional finite element model and a significant modification of the NIKE3D program originally developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) of the U.S. Department of Energy. This study evaluated the sensitivity of NIKE3D-FAA rigid pavement responses with respect to top-down and bottom-up cracking. The analysis was conducted by positioning a Boeing 777-300ER aircraft at different locations (interior, corner, and edge) as base cases while varying other NIKE3D-FAA inputs, including rigid pavement geometric features, mechanical properties of paving and foundation materials, and temperature gradient and thermal coefficient of Portland Cement Concrete (PCC) layers. Several sensitivity charts were developed by examining the sensitivity of critical pavement responses to each input variation. Sensitivity evaluations were performed using a normalized sensitivity index (NSI) as the quantitative metric. Using such sensitivity evaluation, the most significant NIKE3D-FAA input parameters for generating an effective synthetic database that will lower computational cost for future modeling developments have been identified.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AV070 Standing Committee on Aircraft/Airport Compatibility.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Rezaei-Tarahomi, Adel
  • Kaya, Orhan
  • Ceylan, Halil
  • Gopalakrishnan, Kasthurirangan
  • Kim, Sunghwan
  • Brill, David R
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Airport runways; Concrete pavements; Rigid pavements; Sensitivity analysis
• Identifier Terms: NIKE3D-FAA (Computer program)
• Uncontrolled Terms: Bottom-up cracking; Top-down cracking
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Pavements;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01625888
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-05466
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 13 2017 5:19PM