Quantification of the Effect of Maintenance Activities on Texas Road Network
Jorge Prozzi and Ambarish Banerjee, University of Texas at Austin, August 2012, 54 pp.
Pavement structures are designed for a finite life, usually referred to as performance period. This performance period is typically between 20 to 25 years for flexible pavements and between 25 and 40 years for rigid pavements. After this period, the pavement is predicted to reach a terminal level in terms of several preset criteria. This performance period can be reached by designing a structure that will withstand the effects of traffic and the environment through the design period or by planning a series of maintenance and rehabilitation activities that will keep the structure above the present terminal levels until the end of the design life is reached.
The objective of this study is to gather data on pavement performance from FHWA’s Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) study. The sections will be selected such that they provide enough time-series information to obtain reliable pavement performance trends. Once the data are collected, the various pavement sections will be modeled using mechanistic-empirical principles and they performance will be predicted. The Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) will be used for this purpose. In addition, empirical performance models will be developed to capture the performance (and in particular the differential performance) of the various sections. Once these two types of performance models are available, we will compare the effectiveness of the three types of sections.
Keywords: Pavement Preservation, Rehabilitation, MEPDG, LTPP, SPS-3, SPS-5
ENTIRE REPORT (Adobe Acrobat File – 1 MB)