Formulation for Viscoelastic Response of Pavements under Moving Dynamic Loads

Abstract

This paper provides a time-domain solution to the problem of viscoelastic pavement response under moving dynamic loads. It assumes linear material behavior and uses Boltzman's principle to superimpose the effect of a loading function with time-dependent amplitude to the influence function of a pavement response parameter. The unique element of this formulation is that it takes into account the variation of the dynamic load within the area of influence of the moving load at any particular location. This formulation is applied in evaluating the effect of two suspension types, generically referred to as air and rubber. Dynamic load data for these suspensions was experimentally obtained with an instrumented vehicle. The accumulation of strain cycles along the road was translated into number of repetitions to fatigue failure assuming spatial repetitiveness of dynamic loads. Overall pavement section failure was defined as the number of repetitions corresponding to the 90th percentile of the subsection survival curves. The relative damaging effect of the two suspensions was evaluated in terms of the ratio of the number of repetitions to failure for a load of constant magnitude divided by the number of repetitions to failure for the dynamic load.