Correlations among pavement surface roughness, moving dynamic vehicle loads, and concrete pavement performance

The dynamic loads imposed by moving vehicles have variations in load magnitude due to the surface roughness of the pavement system and larger dynamic loads than the design loads can affect the pavement performance and life. The purpose of this study was to find the relationships among the pavement surface roughness, variations in moving dynamic vehicle loads, and the performance of the concrete pavement system. The artificial pavement profiles of triangular amplitude variation were developed first to use in the analysis to find the effects of the wavelength and amplitude of the surface roughness on the moving dynamic vehicle loads. The analysis was performed and the relationships between the surface roughness elements and the load magnitude, the load frequency, and the phase between the front- and rear-axle loads, of the moving tandem-axle loads were found. To obtain the pavement responses to moving arbitrary vehicle loads, formulations were developed in the transformed field domain using a triple Fourier transform in time, space, and moving space. Based on the analysis results of this study, the correlations among the surface roughness, dynamic vehicle loads, and the pavement performance could be obtained.