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Design considerations
Use of tables and figures related to the
factors considered
Structural design procedure
Design considerations for the
AASHTO Flexible Pavement Design
The following factors are considered in the pavement thickness
design.
Pavement performance
Traffic
Roadbed soils (subgrade material)
Materials of construction
Environment
Drainage
Reliability
Pavement performance
Structural Cracking, faulting, raveling, etc.
Functional Riding comfort (measured in terms of
roughness of pavement.)
Mr (lb/in2) = 1500 x CBR for fine-grain soils with soaked CBR of 10 or less.
Mr (lb/in2) = 1000 + 555 x (R-value) for R <= 20
Materials of construction (Subbase), a 3
Charts are available to convert the properties of pavement
construction materials to structural numbers: a3, a2, and a1
Base!
Use CBR, R-value, or Mr
to find a2 values
Structural number of
the base course, a2
Materials of construction (AC surface), a 1
0.44
Structural number of
the AC surface, a1
= Resilient modulus, Mr
Step 1 Environment
Temperature and rainfall
affect the level of strength of the
subgrade, reflected on the value
of resilient modulus. AASHTO
developed a chart that helps you
to estimate the effective roadbed
soil resilient modulus using the
serviceability criteria (in terms
of relative damage, uf.)
Determine the average uf.
value and obtain Mr from the
chart or the equation of uf. .
The bar on the right is used
twice: Once to read uf value for
Step 2 each months sample Mr, then to
read annual average Mr using the
Step 3 average uf value.
Drainage
Time required to
drain the
base/subbase layer to
Step 1 50% saturation.
Step 2
Reliability
The reliability factor (FR) is computed using:
The Reliability design level (R%), which determine assurance levels that
the pavement section designed using the procedure will survive for its
design period (it is a z-score from the standard normal distribution
the standard deviation (So) that accounts for the chance variation in the
traffic forecast and the chance variation in actual pavement performance
for a given design period traffic, W18.
log10 FR Z R S o Why do we have a negative sign here? Are ZR values
negative? Why not ZRSo! Well the clue is in Eq. 20-13 and
the bell curve shown below.
One-sided Z- SD, So
score is used
here. Flexible 0.40-0.5
pavements
Fail Survive
Rigid 0.30-0.40
pavements
Structural design
The object of the design using the AASHTO method is to determine a flexible
pavement SN adequate to carry the projected design ESAL.
The method discussed in the text (Example 20-8) applies to ESALs greater
than 50,000 for the performance period. The design for ESALs less than this is
usually considered under low-volume roads.
log10 W18 Z R S o 9.36 log10 SN 1 0.20
log10 PSI /( 4.2 1.5)
0.40 1094 /( SN 1)5.19 Where,
2.32 log10 M r 8.07
SN a1 D1 a2 D2 m2 a3 D3 m3
ESAL is an estimated value. It may actually more or less. In the design formula,
however, the ESAL value is set to a constant. Then to make sure the pavement survive,
you have to have a thicker one than the thickness that the estimated ESAL requires. To
make that happen in the design formula, we need to subtract a value from the RHS.
Hence, the reliability factor must be negative. The only way to make ZRSo smaller is to
have a negative value of Z because S is always positive.
How to use Fig. 20.20 to get structural
numbers based on Eq. 20.13
For subbase, For base course,
Mr=13,500 Mr=31,000
SN1= 2.6