Impact of pavement roughness and suspension systems on vehicle dynamic loads on flexible pavements

Abstract

Several mechanistic-empirical software packages have been developed in the last two decades to address the impact of axle load and axle configuration on pavement responses and their performance. These software packages generally do not consider the vehicle pavement interaction. The interaction of truck suspension system with the roughness of the road surface may exert additional forces to the pavement.A process to quantify the impact of truck suspension systems and road surface condition on the damage exerted to the pavement is presented in this paper. The International Roughness Index (IRI) was used to simulate the road roughness. The truck-pavement interaction was then modeled to estimate the dynamic load applied to the pavement. The process followed to develop the algorithms is discussed, followed by a parametric study to demonstrate the interaction among the suspension properties, road roughness and vehicle speed. The impact of dynamic load on the pavement distresses and the progress of deterioration is also discussed.

Keywords

• Pavements
• Dynamic loads
• Damage
• Road roughness
• Truck suspension
• Truck-pavement interaction