STRUCTURAL EVALUATION AND OVERLAY DESIGN: ANALYSIS AND IMPLEMENTATION. SIXTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, STRUCTURAL DESIGN OF ASPHALT PAVEMENTS, VOLUME I, PROCEEDINGS, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, JULY 13-17, 1987, ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN

Abstract

Increasing use of the Falling Weight Deflectometer for pavement evaluation has led to more widespread data being available on insitu effective elastic stiffnesses of pavement layers. This parameter is a dominant one in evaluation using mechanistic methods. An improved back-analysis procedure is described, involving a computer program PADAL, that allows accurate and unique values of insitu effective stiffness to be determined for each significant pavement layer. The program has also been used to determine optimum radial locations for the deflection transducers used in FWD surveys on particular pavements. The evaluation procedure using PADAL forms part of a design method for remedial treatment of asphalt pavements using a mechanistic approach and two case studies are considered. The first of these involves an old structure with a granular base, while the second illustrates how the FWD and the associated computations can be applied to identifying damage to a new lean concrete base caused by construction traffic overloading.