Verification of the Calibrated Fatigue Cracking Models for the 2002 Design Guide (With Discussion)

The new design approach adopted in the 2002 Design Guide utilized a mechanistic-empirical pavement design procedure. This necessitated that a new set of fatigue cracking models to be used in the new design method to reflect the new design procedure. The pavement fatigue cracking prediction models included in the Design Guide were calibrated by using actual sections from the Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) database, to reflect the field performance of the flexible pavements. To ensure that the calibrated model is as accurate as possible and that the predicted model trends are as close as possible to what experience, practical knowledge and reasonable engineering judgment of the performance of the asphalt concrete pavements allows; an extensive sensitivity analysis was conducted using a wide variety of salient variables that were felt to have an impact on both types of fatigue cracking (top-down and bottom-up) considered in the Design Guide. This paper contains an in-depth detailed analysis for the entire sensitivity study. A typical section was run using the 2002 Design Guide software. Different levels for each variable considered were used while keeping the other variables constant. The results of the sensitivity runs and the performance of the section with respect to the variables was very logic and relevant to the performance expected.

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  • English

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  • Accession Number: 01020754
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Files: TRIS
  • Created Date: Mar 27 2006 11:07AM