Flexible Pavement Thermal Stresses with Variable Temperature

Abstract

A comprehensive analytical treatment of flexible pavement thermal stresses with variable temperature is presented in this paper. General solutions for equations of equilibrium expressed in terms of displacement and variable temperature are derived by Laplace transformation, Hankel transformation, and Laplace transformation with respect to the time and radial and vertical coordinates, respectively. For multi-layered problems, the transfer matrix method is utilized to obtain the general solutions. The calculated results confirm the importance and the need to account for the thermal stresses in design and analysis of flexible pavement.