A comprehensive study about stresses in upside-down pavements

Abstract

This paper presents a study about the effect of thicknesses and resilient moduli of upside-down pavement layers on the stresses that occur on surface course. For this, a full factorial experiment was developed considering three layers upside-down pavement structures with thicknesses and resilient moduli variations, generating 20,160 experimental conditions, whose elastic behaviors were simulated using Elsym5 software. Factorial statistical analysis was used to evaluate the results and another simulation set was made evaluating variable effect separately. The results indicated that there is increase on tensile stresses on surface course when (i) there is decrease of the surface course thickness or increase of granular layer thickness; (ii) an increase of resilient modulus of surface course or a decrease of resilient modulus of granular base course. Cemented base course thicknesses, resilient modulus and the subgrade modulus have no or slight influence on surface coarse induced stresses.