Mechanistic analysis of in-service airfield concrete pavement responses (Colorado)

A rigid pavement mechanistic analysis is presented based on data assembled from aircraft and environmental loadings at the Denver International Airport (DIA). The DIA database included strain and deflection data from actual aircraft passes, lateral position sensor data, joint movement data, pavement temperature distributions, and deflection basins from non-destructive testing (NDT). Since the analysis of pavement responses requires a good estimation of several pavement parameters, part of the research effort concentrated on estimating pavement properties under existing conditions. This research explored two major factors in the analysis of pavement responses for a given pavement structure: temperature curling and slab-base interface condition.; A background about DIA instrumentation project and database is first presented, along with the description of some tools used to analyze the data. The methodology developed to identify the aircraft location within the instrumented section is also presented along with the wander pattern analyses for all commercial aircraft in the database. Pavement properties were estimated using innovative backcalculation techniques applied to Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) data. In addition, the effects of methodology, pavement model and the number of sensors on the backcalculated parameters were evaluated. A comprehensive evaluation of the Integrated-Climatic-Model (ICM) for pavement temperature prediction is also presented since there were many gaps in the measured pavement temperature data. The effect of temperature on load transfer efficiency (LTE) and joint opening was also evaluated. A new correlation between average pavement temperature and dummy joint LTE was derived.; The effect of temperature curling on pavement responses was analyzed. A theoretical analysis of the effect of pavement temperature distribution on total and load-induced responses is presented and complemented with Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The analysis of in-situ interface condition was based on multi-sensor readings and comparison between theoretical and measured data. The existence of gaps beneath the slab and the interface condition were evaluated based on Multi-Depth Deflectometers (MDDs) and paired strain gage data, respectively. Two interface conditions (bonded and unbonded) were compared to measured responses allowing for estimating in-situ interface condition.