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responses, i.e., stress, strain, and deformation of pavements. In case of airport pavements,
where high aircraft loads with complex tire assemblies are applied to the pavement, the
model used to calculate the pavement responses should be developed with additional
considerations. In this study, the effects of parameters such as the stress dependency of the
aggregate base course (ABC) layer, tire imprint, landing gear configuration, and shear
stresses due to tire loading are considered to evaluate the pavement response that governs the
pavement design.
In this study the stress dependency of the aggregate base course (ABC) layer which is
believed to be the principal structural component of the flexible pavement is modeled using
user material subroutines (UMAT) in ABAQUS FEM software where the resilient modulus
is assumed to be a function of bulk stress. The resilient modulus is calculated at any load
increment for all integration points based on the calculated strains at the beginning of each
load increment and will be used to calculate the stresses. In order to have the stress
dependent material parameters for the ABC layer, Discrete Element Modeling (DEM) is used
and effect of different parameters such as grain size distribution and stress state on the
higher resilient modulus values, and the resilient modulus of granular materials increases
with increase in bulk stress. The DEM simulation results were calibrated using laboratory test
The pavement response calculated from the 3D FEM models were used to estimate the
maximum allowable number of load repetitions for a given pavement section that was
compared with the maximum allowable number of load repetitions calculated using the FAA
flexible airport pavement design procedure. The stress dependency of the ABC layer was
For the design of airport pavements, literature review suggests the use of elliptical tire
imprint instead of circular tire imprint for design. In this study, it was observed that using
elliptical tire imprint will result in lower allowable number of load repetitions for fatigue
cracking (Nf) which turned out to be more significant in case of full depth asphalt pavement
section where the fatigue cracking was the critical pavement distress controlling the total
Aircrafts will apply significant shear loads on airport pavements. In this study, lower
allowable number of load repetitions was observed for the pavement in presence of shear
loads. Although the mentioned observation was captured more clearly for circular tire
imprint, but in case of full depth asphalt pavement section, presence of shear loads impacted
the pavement response for both circular and elliptical tire imprints.
Three Dimensional Nonlinear Finite Element Analysis
of Airport Pavements
by
Hamed Mojarrad
Civil Engineering
2011
APPROVED BY:
_______________________________ ______________________________
A. A. Tayebali M. S. Rahman
(Chair of Advisory Committee) (Co-chair of Advisory Committee)
_______________________________ ______________________________
T. Hassan N. P. Khosla