PERFROMANCE EVALUATION OF PERPETUAL PAVEMENT

Abstract

The perpetual structural pavement design is being researched for usage worldwide. This thick structural design can provide numerous potential benefits but it also has specific costs. Cool Pakistani winters and hot summers impact pavement performance and make pavement design challenging. This is further complicated by a heavy dependence on trucks to transport imports and exports. Consequently, most Pakistani roads are subjected to rapid deterioration due to high fatigue stresses and rapid growth of the traffic loads. The concept of a perpetual pavement design was raised to overcome the limitation of structural capacity of the conventional pavement designs. The concept of perpetual pavement was explained and introduced in this thesis and the benefits behind the perpetual pavement construction were studied. Performance evaluation tests were performed by evaluating the expected ability of pavement section to withstand the traffic loads and climate impact throughout the design life of that pavement with minimum damage. The minimum damage is expressed as low vertical pressure on top of subgrade, low shear stresses in the surface course and low tensile strain at the bottom of asphalt layers. We performed Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) for the perpetual and conventional pavement designs to evaluate the cost benefits of the two pavement designs for 45-year analysis period. This pavement design involved creating a complete comparison and validation of the benefits of using perpetual asphalt pavements versus the conventional asphalt pavement in highways for heavy traffic.