Temperature Effect on Flexible Pavement Responses

Authors:

Praveen Aggarwal (National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra)

Keywords: Temperature, Flexible Pavement, KENLAYER, Design Life.

Abstract:

From recent studies in flexible pavement design it is found out that the most sensitive and important part of pavement composition is its top bituminous layer as it tolerates all the load and friction due to load repetitions. Bituminous layer play an important role in the design life of pavements. Many factors like load repetitions, different load groups and contact pressure affects the performance of flexible pavement, besides these factors there is another important factor that is “Temperature” which affects the thick bituminous pavement performance. Temperature affects the material properties like elastic modulus of bituminous layer in pavements. In the present study effect of temperature change is accounted for the pavement responses. With damage analysis the effect temperature variation on design life of pavement is studied. Results show that with the increase in temperature from 20°C and 40°C the design life of flexible pavement decreases by more than 50%. Tensile stains at the bottom of bituminous layer are much more affected due to temperature change than compressive strains at the top of subgrade.

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