Dynamic Analysis of Flexible Pavement Under Accelerated Vehicle Loading

Abstract

A three-dimensional flexible pavement simulated in ANSYS for typical road section in Nepal. The pavement's adopted finite element model (FE) is validated with the classical theoretical formulations for half-space pavement. The validated model is further utilized to understand pavement response with and without considering friction between the pavement and material nonlinearity. The material properties of pavement considered in the analysis is taken from typical road section used in Nepal. The inclusion of friction in FEM pavement represents more to the realistic nature of pavement with which the computation becomes more demanding due to frictional nonlinearity. The vertical displacement has increased while the stress and strain have decreased compared to the bonded model. The nonlinear pavement model produce response result always higher than the corresponding elastic loading under accelerated vehicular loading. The vertical displacement at bottom of asphalt is about 19 % and 12 % larger for nonlinear response. A comparison between maximum response during constant velocity and deaccelerated loading, the maximum stress on pavement under deaccelerated loading (with 5 m/s2 from 10km/hr to 5 km/hr) is lesser than the constant velocity loading (5km/hr) while is greater than vehicle loading moving with 10 km/hr. The result of pavement from ANSYS simulation can be used for designing purpose basesd on iterative modeling of section for economical and safe design.