Effectiveness of FWD to Simulate Traffic Loading in Recycled Pavements

Abstract

The aim of the present research is to investigate the effectiveness of the falling weight deflectometer (FWD) to simulate the traffic loading in the case of asphalt pavements that have been cold in-depth recycled (CIR) using foamed asphalt (FA) as a stabilization treatment for base works. The investigation is related with the need of understanding the behavior of asphalt CIR pavements under repeated traffic loads that can result in the prediction of pavement performance and contribute in the optimization of pavement design or redesign. For this purpose, a testing experiment was conducted to monitor and document the in situ developed strains under both FWD loading and truck loading, and to compare them with the calculated ones from finite-element (FE) linear elastic analysis. The developed strains were measured using a fiber optic sensors (FOS) system. The collected data were processed and analyzed taking into account the local conditions. The analysis results indicated that the maximum tensile strains from FWD loading were similar to the values generated by traffic (truck) loading. This was more evident at the bottom of the FA recycled layer.