Book - The Contact Patch

10/5/2017 Book : The Contact Patch
Transport technology from the ground up
General Map
G.3000-0119
Road Rail
C.3000-0018 R.3000-0018
Previous chapter: C.1603 C.1602 Next chapter: G.0119
C.1602
The pavement structure
The path followed by a railway train is determined by the geometry of the track, and the
wheel loads never deviate more than a few millimetres from the centre of each rail. But road
vehicles can wander from one side of the road to the other, overtaking, steering round
obstacles and occasionally parking at the kerb. Hence the road surface must be continuous
over a relatively large area, and strong enough to bear the wheel loads anywhere across the
width swept out by vehicles of different shapes and sizes. The only way to do this is to
spread a lot of material across the ground surface in the form of a thick, hard skin. The
function of the skin is to reduce the stresses under each tyre to a manageable level before
they reach the ground beneath: a strong pavement spreads the load over a larger area than a
weak one and enables the passage of heavy lorries that would otherwise sink into a weak soil.
Of course the road has other purposes too: mainly to provide grip for vehicle tyres together
with a smooth surface to ride on. These two aspects are dealt with separately in Section
C1603.
Roads are built largely from natural materials dug out of the ground. Vast amounts are
consumed in this way, much greater than those needed for a railway line carrying an
equivalent amount of traffic. The total area of public road in Britain is about 3,300 square
kilometres. Assuming an average depth of 0.2 m and density of 1500 kg per cubic metre, the
total weight of prepared material comes to one thousand million tonnes, more than thirty
tonnes for every vehicle in the land.
How a pavement works
Any structure that forms a surface over which vehicles or pedestrians can move is technically
known as a pavement. In the UK, the part over which vehicles move is called the carriageway,
and the part over which pedestrians move, the footway. The ground surface on which it is laid
is known as the grade, and the material beneath the subgrade. Ultimately, it is the subgrade
that supports the weight of passing vehicles, and in this sense, the pavement doesnt actually
carry loads at all, at least not in the same way as a bridge or a skyscraper. When a bridge
fails, it is liable to collapse in a spectacular fashion, whereas the failure of a pavement is
gradual because it cant fall down. But it can disintegrate, and the damage accumulates with
every passing vehicle.
In fact, most natural soils can bear a considerable weight provided the weight is distributed
evenly over a sufficient area and the soil is kept dry so any load is transmitted directly from
one granule to the next. The surface should be waterproof, and the edges well drained so
that water cannot percolate beneath. The reason is that once it penetrates the pavement
material or the soil below, water has a destructive effect because it is virtually
incompressible. When soil is heavily compacted, there are not many spaces left between the
granules and it doesnt take much water to fill them. When theyre full, the load no longer
passes through the solid matter but (at least partially) through the liquid, whose pressure
rises and relieves the contact forces among the granules. Since they no longer press against
http://the-contact-patch.com/book/road/c1602-the-pavement-structure 1/18
one another, the granules cannot interlock and instead, behave more like ball bearings in a
bath of oil. Worse, a heavy vehicle passing overhead will squeeze the material and cause
water to be ejected under pressure. As it rushes out of the gaps it will carry the finer particles
with it allowing the granules to move more freely. Saturated soil quickly becomes a soggy
mass (figure 1).
Figure 1
The effect of water on the soil beneath
Wheel loads
The pressure exerted on a pavement surface varies widely according to who or what is
standing on it (figure 2). In the case of a family saloon car, the tyres exert a pressure of about
35 kPa, compared with 1500 kPa under the tyre of an Airbus A380 undercarriage, about 40
times as much. On a footway, the stress under the 6 mm x 6 mm heel of a stiletto shoe peaks
at around 15000 kPa, ten times as much again [13]. But for the highway engineer, the
greatest challenge is the heavy lorry. The stress is less than the stress under a stiletto heel,
but the load is greater. In most countries, the maximum permitted load for any one axle is
around 10 tonnes, and since the axle usually rests on four wheels we can see that the
maximum load passing through a single contact patch is 2.5 tonnes. The tyre will exert a
pressure of around 700 kPa or 700 kilonewtons per square metre at the road surface [13] and
somehow this must be reduced to a value that lies within the bearing capacity of the soil
beneath. The bearing capacity of gravel is around 600 kPa, that of sand about half as much,
and clay half as much again [15]. On this basis, gravel is nearly strong enough to carry
heavy lorries: the problem is not so much to reduce the pressure but to stabilise the surface
so the individual chippings cant move. Clay is a different matter. Here, the pavement must
effectively reduce the stress by a factor of at least four.
Figure 2
Pavement contact stresses for different types of load
The cone of stress

When you place a heavy weight on the ground, the load spreads out beneath the surface so
that immediately underneath, the stress decreases with increasing depth. But no matter how
far down you go, it never vanishes entirely. Imagine the earth sliced by horizontal cuts like an
enormous loaf of bread standing on end, and concentrate on the cut whose plane is located
say one kilometre below the surface. In principle, a lorry travelling along a motorway is
detectable even at this level, in the form of a very small increase in stress spread over a very
large area. The plane extends indefinitely in all directions, but we can imagine it broken down
into small squares each acted on by a small load increment. If we add together all the load
increments, the answer will be equal to the weight of the vehicle at the surface.
Surprisingly perhaps, the weight has an effect at a considerable horizontal distance away
from the contact patch too. Imagine an agricultural tractor parked in a field and consider the
nearside rear wheel say. Now in your imagination walk 10 paces away from the wheel in any
given direction, and choose a point on the ground surface. Therell be no sign of any extra
pressure in the soil, because at the surface itself, the vertical stress increment is zero. But
immediately below the surface, things change. A millimetre down, the stress increment will
be microscopically small, but it is real, and as we shall see, it increases with depth up to a
maximum value and then declines. Everywhere within the earths sphere, the extra stress
produced by the tractor wheel is non-zero at any finite depth, and in this sense, the tyre has
a wide sphere of influence. You cannot draw a boundary that defines where the effects of the
wheel load end.
With this in mind, lets return to the key question: how quickly does the load spread out
under the tyre of a road-going vehicle? This is vital because it determines how thick (and
therefore how expensive) the pavement structure must be in order to reduce the stress to a
value within the bearing capacity of the underlying soil. The standard model in highway
engineering textbooks depicts the process as a cone of stress (figure 3) that spreads out
laterally at an angle of about 45 [22]. This is a useful simplification but can it be justified?
Why should the contours should follow a conical pattern, and why should the angle of the
cone should be 45 ?
Figure 3
The 45 cone of stress
Denote the wheel load by P , and imagine once more a horizontal plane within the earth some
distance below the contact patch. Well draw on it a series of concentric circles. Take any
given circle and divide its area into small parts. If we know the vertical stress on each part
(well propose a formula shortly), we can multiply the stress by the area to get a load, this
being the part of the wheel load that is channelled through the area in question. For the circle
as a whole we calculate the total load passing within its perimeter by summing the individual
loads, in other words we integrate the stress with respect to area. Suppose the result comes
to 0.5P . This tells us that at the depth in question, half of the wheel load passes through the
circle and half outside. In the language used by statisticians, the circle represents a 50%
quantile. What about the other circles we have drawn? Each circle represents a different
quantile, with the 0% quantile as a dot in the centre, and circles of increasing size
representing greater proportions of the load.
Figure 4
How a load might spread into the ground underneath a pavement
We can now move to a greater depth to repeat the exercise, and draw a similar set of circles.
Each quantile will have a larger diameter than previously because the load will be spread over
a larger area. If we continue to do this we see that any particular quantile will grow in
diameter with increasing depth. It now makes sense to examine how rapidly the growth takes
place for any particular quantile say the 50% quantile. Is the growth linear, with the
diameter exactly proportional to depth, or does it follow some other pattern? figure 4 shows
some alternatives. To find the answer, we turn to some 19th century mathematics.
Stress distribution
Exactly how the stress decays underneath a wheel load is quite a difficult theoretical problem.
It helps if the contact patch is shrunk to a single point, and the earth is regarded as a
perfectly elastic, isotropic material that extends to infinity horizontally and vertically beneath
a flat plane. It wasnt until 1848 that Kelvin formulated the differential equations for stress
under a point load under these assumptions, and only in 1885 did the French mathematician
Boussinesq publish the solution [20]. If P is the wheel load, and E is the modulus of elasticity
of the soil, then the vertical stress z at a depth z below the surface and a horizontal distance
r from the vertical load centreline is given by the formula
3Pz
3
(1)
z =
5
2 R
where
R
2
= r
2
+ z
2
(2)
(Note that for present purposes we are counting a compressive load as positive, whereas
structural engineers usually count tension as positive). Of course, a point load is physically
impossible because it implies infinite stress, which no real material can withstand. But the
formula gives values reasonably close to the true ones except in the immediate vicinity of the
contact patch. Bearing this in mind, it is a straightforward task to plot lines of equal stress as
shown in figure 5. What we are looking at is a cross-section of a series of 3-dimensional
surfaces each shaped like an old-fashioned electric light bulb. Note that each bulb has
exactly the same proportions but is scaled to a different size.
Figure 5
Boussinesq contours for vertical stress under a point load
We can now return to our earlier notion of a load quantile. For a circle of radius r at depth z ,
we can find the proportion p of the load concentrated within that circle by integrating the
expression for the vertical stress in equation 1 with respect to radius over the range 0 to r . It
is not difficult to show that the proportion is given by
p = 1
1 (3)
3
2 2
r
1 +
( z
2
)
and by substituting any particular numerical value for p we can solve for r in terms of z . For
any given p, the relationship turns out to be a straight line. Suppose, for example, we wanted
to know the radius of the circle containing just two-thirds of the load. We put p = 0.667 and
then we find

1

2/3
(4)
r = z 1 = z 0.333 1 = 1.040z
2/3
(1 p)
This is just a straight line at an angle of about 46 to the vertical. It seems we have arrived at
a general principle: under the assumptions as weve stated them, any given proportion of the
load spreads out over an area whose radius increases linearly with increasing depth, and if we
choose a value for p equal to about 0.67, the angle is very close to the model depicted by the
45-degree cone of stress. However, the thing that is spreading out is not a stress contour or
boundary, but a quantile representing roughly two-thirds of the wheel load. Figure 6 shows
the complete set of quantiles.
Figure 6
Quantiles of load
Pavement materials
Even without anything to glue them together, it is not difficult to make a pavement from
layers of stones with sharp corners that interlock under pressure so that any load applied to
the surface spreads out progressively over a wider area as it passes downwards through the
material (figure 7). A structure of this kind has for the last 150 years been the traditional
method for supporting railway tracks, where the stones are all roughly the same size and the
surface has an open texture. But for roads, where the surface is churned up by moving
vehicle wheels, this would quickly disintegrate, and instead, the stones are well graded with
a mixture of many different sizes. Before the road is opened to traffic, the stones are
compacted so they form a dense interlocking mass whose surface resists water penetration
and rutting.
Figure 7
How granules interlock and spread a wheel load
Unbound roads
Early roads in Europe, and existing roads in many countries today, were built mostly along
these lines, i.e., made from smallish stones rammed into prepared ground. It sounds
primitive, but such pavements were very effective in the days when the wheels of horse-
drawn wagons were shod with iron rims. In fact they became stronger with use because the
metal rims tended to grind off particles of grit from the surface granules. These particles fell
into the gaps and formed a kind of dry cement bedding that held the larger granules in
position and resisted penetration by rainwater.
In the UK, one of the first engineers successfully to develop unbound road construction of
the type just described was John Loudon McAdam (1756 1836). For McAdam, the challenge
was not just to build durable roads, but to build them economically. By dispensing with
foundations, but at the same time paying close attention to drainage together with the
placement of carefully chosen materials, McAdam could produce more miles of serviceable
road within a given budget than his competitors.
Nowadays unbound roads are still in use throughout the world. They would be more common
in the industrialised countries of Western Europe and the USA were it not for the arrival of the
motor car at the end of the nineteenth century. The problem was not size or weight cars are
not particularly heavy but the fact that their rubber tyres sucked out the fine particles that
made the surface waterproof, leaving behind a plume of dust that choked pedestrians, coated
nearby buildings, obscured visibility for other drivers, and clogged the carburettor and
cooling system of the vehicle itself [6]. It was the discovery that stones could be effectively
glued together with coal tar that made the automobile running on pneumatic tyres
practicable.
Today, many different combinations of material are used in road construction and we wont
try to describe them all. However, we shall mention some of the more important ones before
going on to consider how they stand up to wear. For more information, readers may want to
refer to the design manuals that are currently being updated by the American Association of
State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) [4], or alternatively the UK Highways
Agency Design Manual for Roads and Bridges [24], which can be down-loaded from the
internet site listed at the end of this section.
Bound macadam
A bound macadam is a material in which before they are laid, the stones are coated with
bitumen or cement to bind them together. As with non-bound road materials, coated
macadams rely for their strength on aggregate interlock(figure 7). The stones press directly
against one another, and the bitumen or cement is required only to keep them in place.
Hence the mixture contains air voids, and while it can easily be compacted it is pervious to
water [23]. In Britain, the first mix of this kind was called tar macadam, often shortened to
tarmac (the proper term is asphaltic concrete in line with US and European nomenclature). In
1901, Edgar Purnell Hooley, County Surveyor of Nottinghamshire, patented tar macadam
using coal tar as the binder, but the coal tar was quickly superseded by bitumen, which is
nowadays derived artificially from petroleum. At low temperatures bitumen is brittle but it
becomes visco-elastic at higher temperatures, in other words, a near-solid that flows very
slowly under stress [7]. As with any material embedded in the surface of a modern road,
bitumen has a limited life. Like metals, it is attacked by atmospheric oxygen and towards the
end of its useful life it turns from black to light grey, becomes brittle, and loosens its grip on
the stone chippings [17]. Macadam is used for roads carrying relatively light traffic, having
been superseded for heavy duty work by hot rolled asphalt and its modern derivatives.
Asphalt
Macadam relies for its strength on the aggregate with the glue playing a secondary role. With
asphalt it is the other way round. Asphalt consists of a dense mortar of sand and bitumen
that carries the load, with larger granules of aggregate scattered throughout out the mix to
add bulk and stabilise the material which would otherwise deform under the wheel tracks of
heavy lorries. It is dense and impervious to water [23]. In London, asphalt first appeared in
1869 [5], imported as a naturally-occurring material from Trinidad that contained fine
particles of sand and impregnated limestone together with 10% bitumen. Modern asphalt is
created artificially from bitumen extracted from crude petroleum together with sand and
coarse material such as gravel [8].
The multi-layer flexible pavement

A pavement can take one of two basic structural forms: flexible or rigid. Well start with the
flexible pavement, whose name is a little misleading because it is not flexible in the same
sense as a steel spring. You cant bend it or stretch it, and indeed, if you tried to pick it up
bodily it would disintegrate. Imagine the road material divided into rectangular blocks, the
depth of each block extending from the road surface to the subgrade beneath. Then the
structure is flexible only in the sense that the blocks work independently of one another,
each deflecting slightly when traversed by a vehicle wheel as it transfers the load from the
wheel to the ground beneath. Like McAdams early roads, a modern flexible pavement is
composed of several layers of granular material: crushed rock, gravel, or aggregate.
Nowadays, however, the upper layers are bound together with bitumen. There is a standard
naming convention for these layers as shown in table 1.
Table 1
Nomenclature for flexible road construction layers
Name Function
Surface Provides smooth rolling surface and high friction surface for vehicle tyres, and drains surface water
course (also known as wearing course)
Binder
Holds wearing course in place (also known as base course or regulating layer)
course
Base Main structural layer
Sub-base Contruction platform and drainage layer
Name Function
Capping Protects subgrade
Subgrade Natural soil or rock
Each layer has a distinct function. Starting at the bottom, if the underlying soil is weak it must
be strengthened to avoid being churned up by construction plant. Several methods are
possible, including protection with a capping layer, a kind of temporary road surface made
from cheap material. The sub-base is normally an inexpensive material with an open texture,
for example, unbound crushed rock. It forms a platform for construction traffic, allows water
to drain away to the edge of the carriageway, and helps to spread the traffic loads. The base
and the binder course together form the main structural core. Both are usually bitumen
macadam or rolled asphalt, of a specific grade. The binder course, of denser material, glues
together the top of the base like a thick skin and acts as a regulating layer during the
construction process, taking up any uneveness in the level of the layers below. The surface
course provides a running surface with frictional and drainage properties tailored to the
needs of moving vehicles (see Section C1603).
Figure 8
A flexible pavement
The total thickness of material depends on the level of traffic. For a moderately busy trunk
road, including the sub-base, it might be of the order of 500 mm, with layers as shown in
table 2 (see also figure 8). These layers are not meant to work independently and they dont
slide over one another when deformed under a wheel load: rather, they act together as a
structural unit. The gain can be appreciated by means of a simple analogy. Imagine a pack of
printer paper. If the sheets can slide freely over one another you can bend the pack quite
easily, but if you glue them together you create a rigid block like a wooden breadboard for
example. In the case of a flexible pavement, the bonding is carried out with a tack coat or
bond coat of bitumen that is often mixed with polymer additives.
Table 2
A hypothetical example of layer thicknesses for a trunk road in the UK
Surface course 45 mm Hot rolled asphalt
Binder course 55 mm High Density Macadam
Base 230 mm High Density Macadam
Sub-base 190 mm Local aggregates, unbound or open-texture macadam
Total 520 mm
Hence a multi-layered pavement is structurally complex owing the interactions between the
various layers, and the stresses at any given depth cannot accurately be predicted from the
Boussinesq formula. In any case, not all the important stresses the ones likely to damage or
destroy the pavement fabric are compressive. It is widely assumed that there are two critical
stresses, the first being tensile. It occurs at the bottom of the upper bound layers, and it can
produce alligator cracks at the surface when the pavement approaches the end of its design
life. The second is the vertical compressive stress at the bottom of the underlying unbound
layers, which results in rutting and cracking of the whole pavement [11]. These stresses are
shown diagrammatically in figure 9.
Figure 9
Critical stresses in a flexible pavement
We say assumed because for some years now, our interpretation of the failure mechanism -
and indeed the structural behaviour of the pavement in general - has been in some doubt.
Notwithstanding the development of more complex theoretical models, the evolution of
asphalt pavement construction has been governed as much by trial-and-error as anything
else, and successful implementation of any particular scheme still relies a great deal on
experience together with attention to the quality of materials and the conditions under which
they are laid (for example, the weather). According to some, black top is a black art.
Rigid pavements
Paradoxically, a rigid pavement behaves more like a plastic ruler than a flexible pavement,
albeit a very stiff one. A reinforced concrete slab, it bridges across soft patches and spreads
the wheel loads over a relative wide area. While the slab forms the main structural
component, it is usually overlaid with a thin asphalt surfacing, whose composition can be
tailored to provide high skid resistance and low tyre noise, and can be renewed more readily
than a concrete surface. The whole is placed on a cement-bound aggregate base.
Given that they are so robust, it comes as a surprise to learn that all concrete roads crack.
They crack not because they are weak, but because concrete shrinks when it dries out after
first being laid. It also expands and contracts with changes in temperature, and when the
temperature falls, the contraction is resisted by friction with the material underneath. This
puts the slab into enormous tension, which explains why the concrete is usually reinforced
with a mesh of steel bars, whose role is not to strengthen the slab against wheel loads but to
control the cracking (figure 10). At one time, it was common practice to insert construction
joints at regular intervals to allow the contraction to take place: the concrete could then be
laid as a series of separate slabs like tiles on a bathroom floor. But the joints in early concrete
roads turned out to be vulnerable because compared with the centre of a slab, the edges
have much less resistance to deflection under a wheel load. Consequently, as a lorry passes
from one slab to the next, the edge of the first slab will be pushed downwards relative to the
edge of the second slab. Repeated movements of this kind will weaken the joint sealing
material. If water gets into the joint, matters quickly deteriorate, because each deflection
pumps out some of the water under pressure, taking soil particles with it and enlarging the
cavity underneath. To prevent this, steel dowel bars must be inserted between neighbouring
slabs in order to provide continuity as wheel loads pass from one to the other, while still
allowing for contraction. They function in much the same way as the fishplates that were
once used to connect neighbouring lengths of rail on railway lines, that is to say, not very
well.
Figure 10
A continuously reinforced concrete pavement
Railway practice has moved on, and so has highway construction. Nowadays, the road base
can be laid as a continuous slab, and the shrinkage managed in a different way. In a
continuously reinforced concrete pavement, the cracks are accepted as inevitable, but the
system is designed to ensure that they occur at frequent, regular intervals, partly by virtue of
the reinforcement itself, and partly by moulding grooves in the slab at intervals of a few
metres, or cutting them with a diamond saw a few hours after the concrete is poured. The
cracks that subsequently form dont affect the strength of the slab because they are only
about 0.2 mm wide, and there is sufficient contact between neighbouring sections so that
they interlock like stone setts or block paving. And once overlaid with asphalt surfacing, the
slab as a whole is waterproof.
A similar technique is also used in flexible composite pavements, which are essentially
bitumen pavements with the base replaced by a cement-bound mix. Because it is a spongy
concrete, the base is liable to contract and form lateral cracks at 10 30 m intervals, which
will eventually show up at the road surface (a phenomenon known as reflective cracking). The
solution is deliberately to induce cracks in the base at more frequent intervals. It seems that
concrete pavements are among the very few artefacts that last longer if they are broken
before being used.
How a pavement deteriorates

The surface of a road is continually under attack, not just from the impact of wheel loads but
also from corrosion associated with noxious chemicals deposited by passing traffic. It is also
affected by the ultra-violet radiation in sunlight, extremes of temperature, and immersion in
water. All shorten its life.
Rutting and cracking

The main challenge is the cumulative impact of wheel loads, which can damage the structure
of a pavement in either of two distinct ways: by forming ruts, or by inducing cracks. Ruts
occur primarily because the underlying soil gives way, although squeezing of the pavement
structure itself can contribute (compared with macadams, asphalts are more prone to
deformation of this kind). The ruts occur mostly in the paths followed by the wheels of heavy
lorries, so on a typical UK motorway, where a heavy lorry spends on average about three-
quarters of its journey travelling in the inside lane, the damage is not spread evenly across
the full width of the carriageway.
Tests on German highways have shown that rut depth in a flexible pavement is proportional
to the square root of the number of load passes n:
Rut depth = a + b n

(5)
where a and b are constants. As with all forms of damage, the contribution to rut depth from
a single axle increases sharply as the axle load increases; for example going from 10 tonnes
to 11.5 tonnes magnifies the impact by about 50% [21].
The cracking process, on the other hand, develops in a different way. Crack growth occurs in
materials of all kinds: glass, ceramics and metals for example. In many cases it limits the
strength of a material that in theory should be able to carry a much heavier load, and if only
for this reason has been the subject of scientific study for many years. Put simply, stress
inside a material can be pictured as a fluid. A little bit like a river, or more accurately an
electric current, it flows from the point of application of a load to the place where the load is
finally relieved typically the foundations of a building where it passes into the soil beneath.
It cannot travel through a crack or a cavity inside a material, so it deflects around it, and in
the same way that a stream of liquid accelerates when it passes around an obstruction, the
value of the stress increases because it is constrained to pass through a reduced cross-
section of material. Consequently, near the tip of each crack, the stress is higher than it
would normally be were the material intact. The highly-stressed region tends to crack in turn,
so that in effect, once a crack or defect is present, it will tend to propagate like the roots of a
tree. Tearing the material apart requires energy, and the energy comes not from a single load
application but a series of repeated loading and unloading cycles. In a bitumen road layer,
once it has begun, the cracking process grows exponentially thus [2]:
Crack length per unit area = Ce

n
(6)
So the pavement doesnt give way suddenly like the cracking of a china plate. It behaves more
like a ductile metal after reaching its yield point. If a paperclip is bent and unbent repeatedly,
microscopically small cracks extend with every stress cycle so that the material weakens
progressively until it breaks. Likewise, successive pounding by lorry wheels weakens a
flexible pavement by creating fatigue cracks. For many years, the cracks were thought to start
at the bottom of the bound layers where the tensile stresses are highest, extending
exponentially with the cumulative number n of wheel impacts until they became visible at the
surface. This is now in doubt.
The fourth power law

Experience with bitumen roads before 1939 revealed that the rate of wear is extremely
sensitive to the weight of vehicles using them. The effect was first quantified during
experiments carried out by American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) between
1958 and 1961 during which heavy trucks were run continuously over a series of six test
tracks to achieve a specified degree of deterioration [1]. The results led to an empirical
relationship between axle load W and the number of passes N of that axle load required to
achieve the same damaging effect as one standard axle W0 of 18,000 pounds around 80
kN. The fitted curve took the form
W
4
(7)
N =
(W )
0
The exponent 4 on the right hand side is an approximate figure. It varies appreciably
according to the type of road and makes no distinction between different types of damage,
namely rutting and cracking [9]. Nevertheless, the relationship points to sharp differences in
the effects of different kinds of vehicle. For a heavy truck, one axle will do more damage than
over 10,000 cars, and the damage is increased by a factor of two if the load increases by a
relatively small margin - 20% - above the standard figure. In this sense, the construction and
maintenance of a national highway network must be tailored to the needs of heavy lorries.
For practical purposes, family cars and other light vehicles can be ignored (figure 11).
Figure 11
The fourth power law and the damaging effect of different axle loads
Water and frost

Under the action of repeated wheel loads, all pavements will form minute cracks at the
surface, which let in small amounts of water. The cracks slowly enlarge, wedged open by
particles of detritus. Water that penetrates the carriageway surface has a marked effect on the
lifetime of the pavement: it strips bitumen from the aggregate, erodes the bonds between
layers, and reduces the bearing capacity of the subgrade [18]. The stripping occurs when
water fills the voids and the pressure pulsates under every passing wheel load, so that the
damage in wet weather is many times that in the dry.
Figure 12
Formation of a frost lens in a flexible pavement
In northern countries, water poses an additional hazard in winter because it freezes, and
when water freezes it expands by about 9%. The force that this generates can shatter porous
stones, releasing loose particles that scour the road surface and widen any cracks [16]. These
expansive forces can damage the road in another way, by lifting the surface layers bodily
upwards and creating voids that draw up more water from below. At only one degree Celsius
below freezing, the suction pressure is around 10 atmospheres [16]. The newly-attracted
water freezes in turn, creating more suction which draws in more water. Once begun, the
process can form lenses of considerable size (figure 12), a phenomenon known as frost
heave. Frost heave is one of the reasons why engineers try to ensure that the water table is at
least a metre below formation level when building a new road.
How long will it last?

If carefully built, a bitumen-based flexible pavement can last 40 years, although to remain
serviceable, the surface will need to be renewed every ten years or so. A concrete pavement
can last almost indefinitely but it, too, will need resurfacing at regular intervals. So any
statement about the lifetime of a pavement must take into account two considerations: (a)
which part of the structure are we talking about, and (b) what do we mean by unserviceable?
Failure criteria
Pavement deterioration usually manifests itself in one of three ways: (a) the surface becomes
polished and slippery, (b) the surface deforms, or (c) it disintegrates. We looked at skid
resistance in Section C1603, and here well concentrate on deformation and wear. Surface
deformation becomes critical when it affects the safe movement of vehicles. In a sense, the
surface is distorted from the moment when the carriageway is built, because while roads are
constructed more accurately than used to be the case, there may be errors in the vertical
alignment up to several millimetres from the values specified in the design. Furthermore,
deformation routinely occurs under the tyres of heavy vehicles from the day when the
carriageway is first opened. Under a fully laden lorry, a well-constructed flexible pavement
will deflect a maximum of 0.2 mm, although some minor roads might deflect up to 1 mm
[10]. However, deflections of this order are elastic like the deflections of a steel spring:
when the load is removed the surface springs back to its original shape. For a major road,
only when deflections exceed 0.5 mm are they considered symptomatic of a weakened
pavement in need of attention [19]. Ruts are different because they indicate permanent
deformation of the underlying layers. In practice, a highway authority may consider failure to
have occurred when the rut depth reaches 20 mm, and in many countries a depth of 10 mm
will trigger investigation.
As we have already seen, cracking can quickly lead to complications. In some European
countries, a crack length of 60 100m per 100 linear metres of road is considered as
symptomatic of failure, and therefore requires action [3]. In other countries, the threshold is
taken to be cracking that affects more than 50% of the wheel path. However, much depends
on the width of the cracks. Anything less than 2 mm in width in an asphalt material is
considered minor, and greater than 2 mm, major.
To summarise, during the wearing process both rutting and cracking occur in parallel but at
different rates. The visible signs of rutting usually appear first, but once cracks appear, they
accelerate more quickly. Consequently, there is no cut-and-dried threshold marking the
point at which the pavement fails, and indeed, a cracked or rutted pavement may continue
to give useful service for some years provided it is suitably treated with, for example, an
overlay.
Pavement life
In many countries, road traffic growth has outstripped predictions. Not only are drivers
having to queue in traffic jams, but roads that were designed to last for twenty years or more
have worn out within a few years of opening. Unfortunately as motorists we dont take into
account the cumulative nature of the ageing process. It is quite different from the ageing
process of other structures such as bridges, where the effects of weather and corrosion often
dominate: given suitable treatment, a bridge might reasonably be expected to last for 150
years. But the life of a road shortens with every passing vehicle, so that in periods of steady
economic growth, motorists are presented with a network that seems constantly under repair.
The life cycle of a road is in any case hard to pin down because different parts are replaced at
different intervals. Stages in the life cycle of a pavement might be summarised as shown in
Table 3, which is based on material originally published by Derek Pearson [14]. It now
appears that heavily trafficked flexible pavements can last much longer than they used to
without having to increase the construction depth by identifying failure much earlier in the
lifecycle and applying remedial treatment before surface cracking begins to affect the
structure as a whole. The design life of pavements in the UK is progressively being set at 40
years.
Table 3
Stages in the life cycle of a pavement
Operation Time interval

Preventative maintenance of surface 10 years
Rehabilitation (replacement of surface and binder courses) 15 20 years
Strengthening with overlay 20 years
Reconstruction 40 years
Maintenance
Since a large part of the national roads budget is devoted to maintenance, it is vital to
monitor road surfaces for deterioration, and as far as possible, for engineers to use
consistent and verifiable criteria for assessing whether, and when, treatment is needed. Skid
resistance testing is carried out using specially adapted vehicles. The stiffness of the road
structure as a whole can be assessed by measuring surface deflection under an instrumented
wheel load, with a device known as a deflectograph. But checking for other types of structural
defects is harder. Highway engineers inspect cracks and rutting visually, and take specimen
cores drilled out from the body of the pavement. The process is labour-intensive and
assessment of the results relies a good deal on judgement. Automated monitoring can take
over some of burden and improve the decision-making process. Many governments have now
established automated monitoring systems for trunk roads that produce results quickly and
cheaply, using surface measurements collected from moving vehicles fitted with laser sensors
and video cameras. However, it is not easy to apply the process in towns and cities, where
many people park in the carriageway outside their homes.
Conclusion
Road construction is among the most specialised branches of civil engineering, with its own
vocabulary and design rules. In spite of the engineers best efforts, the results dont always
turn out how one might wish. There are four main reasons for this. First, traffic growth is
unpredictable. Second, the lifetime of the pavement materials depends to some extent on the
conditions under which they are laid; for example, cold wet weather during the construction
period can drastically shorten the life of a road because it stiffens the bitumen and prevents
it from compacting properly. Third, the strength of a road depends on the strength of the
ground underneath, and the ground varies from one stretch of road to the next, sometimes
turning from solid rock to quagmire in just a few metres.
Finally, the behaviour of a pavement under traffic loads is not entirely understood. Until
recently, engineers believed that in structural terms, roads fail from the bottom up. Cracks on
the surface arise from of cracks lower down, which in turn are caused by tensile strain at the
bottom of the bound layers. The logic behind this assumption is straightforward. The largest
tensile stresses in a loaded beam of the kind that holds up your bedroom floor always occur
along the lower face, which is pulled apart as the beam sags in the middle. Cracks are usually
associated with tensile forces, and if you think of the bound layers of the pavement as a
beam laid on a spongy surface, it seems obvious that the largest tensile forces will occur at
the bottom. Hence the cracks must start well below the surface and work upwards. However,
this is now in dispute because the evidence suggests otherwise; over the last twenty years,
many roads have cracked at the surface without any sign of failure below. It seems that our
understanding of the process is due for an overhaul, and eventually this will be reflected in
the way that pavements are designed and the way they perform.
Previous chapter: C.1603 C.1602 Next chapter: G.0119
General Road Rail Map
References
1. ADDIS, R R (1992)
Vehicle loads and road pavement wear. In Heavy vehicles and roads: technology, safety and policy (D Cebon
and C B G Mitchell, editors), Proc 3rd Int Symp on Heavy Vehicle Weights and Dimensions, Cambridge, 28 June
- 2 July 1992
London: Thomas Telford, 233-242, see p233.
2. ADDIS, R R (1992)
- 2 July 1992
3. ADDIS, R R (1992)
- 2 July 1992
4. AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF STATE HIGHWAY AND TRANSPORTATION OFFICIALS (AASHTO) (1993, 4th ed)
AASHTO Guide for Design of Pavement Structures
Washington DC: American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
5. BAGWELL, P and LYTH, P (2002)
Transport in Britain from canal lock to gridlock
London: Hambledon & London, see p92.
6. BIRD A (1973, 2nd ed)
Roads and vehicles
London: Arrow, see p42, 59.
7. BRENNAN, M J and OFLAHERTY, C A (2002a, 4th ed)
Materials used in pavements. In Highways: the location, design, construction and maintenance of pavements (C
A OFlaherty, editor)
Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, 118-162, see p125.
8. BRENNAN, M J and OFLAHERTY, C A (2002b, 4th ed)
Premixed bituminous-bound courses: standard methods. In Highways: the location, design, construction and
maintenance of pavements (C A OFlaherty, editor)
Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, 303-324, see p305.
9. COLLOP, A C (2001)
Alternative methods of traffic characterization in flexible pavement design. Proc Instn Mechanical Engineers Part
D: Journal of Automobile Engineering
Vol 215 (D1), 141-157, see p142.
10. FERNE, B (2004)
Transport Research Laboratory, personal communication 21 April 2004.
11. HUHTALA, M M, J T PIHLAJAMAKI and V V MEITTINEN (1992)
The effect of wide-based tyres on pavements. In Heavy vehicles and roads: technology, safety and policy (D
Cebon and C B G Mitchell, editors), Proc 3rd Int Symp on Heavy Vehicle Weights and Dimensions, Cambridge,
28 June - 2 July 1992
London: Thomas Telford, 211-217.
12. OFLAHERTY, C A (2002, 4th ed)
Soils for roadworks. In Highways:the location, design, construction and maintenance of pavements (C A
OFlaherty, editor)
Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, 109-112.
13. PEARSON, D (2012)
Deterioration and maintenance of pavements
ICE Publishing, see p2.
14. PEARSON, D (2012)
ICE Publishing, see p8, 167.
15. PEARSON, D (2012)
16. PEARSON, D (2012)
17. PEARSON, D (2012)
18. PEARSON, D (2012)
ICE Publishing, see p49, 163-4.
19. PEARSON, D (2012)
20. PEARSON, D (2012)
21. VON BECKER, P J (1992)
Impacts on the road and their effects on road construction and road preservation costs. InHeavy vehicles and
roads: technology, safety and policy (D Cebon and C B G Mitchell, editors), Proc 3rd Int Symp on Heavy Vehicle
Weights and Dimensions, Cambridge, 28 June - 2 July 1992
22. WIGNALL A, KENRICK P S, ANCILL R and COPSON M (1999, 4th ed)
Roadwork: theory and practice
Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, see p77.
23. WIGNALL A, KENRICK P S, ANCILL R and COPSON M (1999, 4th ed)
Roadwork: theory and practice
Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, see p167.
Web sites
24. (UK) HIGHWAYS AGENCY Design manual for roads and bridges:
http://www.dft.gov.uk/ha/standards/dmrb/vol7/section2/hd2606.pdf
(accessed 16 September 2012).

Book - The Contact Patch

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Book - The Contact Patch

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

10/5/2017 Book : The Contact Patch

Transport technology from the ground up

Previous chapter: C.1603 C.1602 Next chapter: G.0119

How a pavement works

The cone of stress

The multi-layer flexible pavement

Base Main structural layer

Sub-base Contruction platform and drainage layer

Subgrade Natural soil or rock

Surface course 45 mm Hot rolled asphalt

Binder course 55 mm High Density Macadam

Base 230 mm High Density Macadam

Sub-base 190 mm Local aggregates, unbound or open-texture macadam

How a pavement deteriorates

Rutting and cracking

Crack length per unit area = Ce

The fourth power law

Water and frost

How long will it last?

Operation Time interval

Rehabilitation (replacement of surface and binder courses) 15 20 years

Strengthening with overlay 20 years

Previous chapter: C.1603 C.1602 Next chapter: G.0119

General Road Rail Map

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen