01553427

Component

Dwindling revenue sources force transportation engineers to implement less durable solutions to distribute limited resources to the most critical and competing maintenance and development projects. However, implementing less durable solutions often increases the infrastructure life cycle costs. Several recent studies have found that a significant portion of truck traffic operates with weights above legal weight limits, which are not considered in current pavement design practices. These overweight trucks cause accelerated pavement deterioration. In this study, authors investigated the deterioration of pavements to quantify relative pavement damage attributed to overweight trucks compared to trucks within legal weight limits. In South Carolina, weigh-in-motion data revealed that 8.3% trucks were either axle overweight or gross vehicle overweight. To accommodate these 8.3% overweight trucks, which are not considered in the current equivalent single axle load (ESAL) based design method, the hot-mix asphalt (HMA) base layer thickness should be increased by 1% to 6% depending on the roadway functional class. The mechanistic-empirical pavement design guide (MEPDG)-based analysis showed that all types of pavement distress increase with increasing truck gross vehicle weight. Among all distress types, fatigue cracking (top-down and bottom-up) was more sensitive to overweight trucks (up to the typical overweight permit limit) compared to rutting and international roughness index (IRI). Similarly, cracking was more sensitive to trucks loaded above typical overweight permit limit (i.e., superload) compared to rutting or IRI. To maximize the infrastructure service life and minimize life cycle costs, transportation agencies should consider accelerated pavement deterioration due to overweight trucks in pavement design.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT055 Truck Size and Weight.

01550057

15-5378

English

19p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Base course (Pavements); Deterioration; Fatigue cracking; Hot mix asphalt; Life cycle costing; Overweight loads; Pavement design; Pavement distress; Pavements; Rutting; Service life; Thickness

International Roughness Index; Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide

Pavement damage

South Carolina

Design; Highways; Pavements; I22: Design of Pavements, Railways and Guideways

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-5378

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 1:48PM