Abstract:
With the current growth of infrastructure in India, traffic growth is very high, especially transportation of goods and services have also increased considerably in many fold and so the commercial vehicles. The current flexible pavement structure has been designed with a standard axle load of 80 kN and a tyre pressure of 560 kPA, as per Indian Road Congress-37, but numerous field studies conducted by CSIR-CRRI have shown that the trucks with standard and higher axles were found to be carrying more load than designated for them. The country presently doesn’t have any guidelines for amount of damages caused by this higher axle load and their corresponding effect on pavement life. So, the present study aims to find the effect of higher load in the flexible pavement in terms of rutting with Accelerated Pavement Testing Facility (APTF). The Pavement was constructed in CSIR-CRRI for the design traffic of 30 msa as per IRC: 37-2001. The pavement was instrumented with Multi-Depth Deflectometer (MDD) to measure the response at each interface layers. Rutting is the longitudinal depression in the wheel path, which effect the structural and functional requirement of the pavement depending on the layers in which rutting is happening. Rutting is mainly associated with higher axle load and temperature in the initial phase of the pavement life. The load was applied initially to standard axle with a higher tyre pressure of 650 kPA, thereafter, axle load was increased to 150% of standard load and finally to 200 % of standard load with the same tyre pressure. It was found that higher load effect the lower layers of the pavement in terms of rutting as compared to standard load.
Contributors: Khan S, Nagabhushana M N, Tiwari D, & Jain P K.