Abstract
There have been developments to the set-up of trucks in the European Union (EU). A significant development for pavement performance has been the widespread adoption of super single tires for truck trailer axles. This is in contrast to the US that has continued with dual tires for truck trailer axles. These EU trucks have particular operating conditions in terms of tire types, axle loading and inflation pressure. The three tire types used on a EU truck were modelled using finite element analysis for varying inflation pressures and varying axle loading. These loads were represented in the modelling as three dimensional (3-D) contact pressures with vertical, transverse and longitudinal contact pressure components. These loads were modelled as moving loads on a perpetual pavement with a visco-elastic surface course to understand the influence of these loads on the performance of the pavement. The pavement design and the material properties are from the Long Term Pavement Performance Program (LTPP). Surface cracking, top down cracking, bottom up cracking and subgrade rutting were assessed using key strains and the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) predictive equations for the different loading combinations. It was found that there was variability in pavement performance for the different loading combinations with the steering axle giving lower performance than the drive axle for surface and top down cracking. The super single trailer tire gave the lowest performance across all the distress types. This means more than just axle loading is required to assess the distress caused by axles.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
ASSET Road Consortium, Pavement monitoring and risk analysis. Advanced Safety and Driver Support for Essential Road Transport, ASSET, Graz, Austria, 2010.
I.L. Al-Qadi, H. Wang, Evaluation of pavement damage due to new tire designs, Illinois Center for Transportation, Illionis, USA, 2009.
G. Foley, K.G. Sharp, Relative effects of wide base radial tires on pavement performance, ARRB Transport Research Vermont South, Victoria, Australia, 2001.
A. L. Priest, D. H. Timm, Mechanistic comparison of wide-base single versus standard dual tire configurations, Transp. Res. Rec. 1949(1) (2006) 155–163.
R. Addis, Effects of wide single tires and dual tires. COST 334. Ministry of Transport and Water, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2002.
D. B. Casey, G. D. Airey, J. R. Grenfell, Relative Near Surface Pavement Performance for Dual and Wide-Base Tyre Assemblies Using a Finite Element Method, 8th RILEM International Conference on Mechanisms of Cracking and Debonding in Pavements, Springer, Netherlands, 2016.
D. H. Timm, D. E. Newcomb, Perpetual pavement design for flexible pavements in the US, Inter. J. Pavement Eng. 7(2) (2006) 111–119.
I. L. Al-Qadi, M. Elseifi, P. J. Yoo, In-Situ Validation of Mechanistic Pavement Finite Element Modeling. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Pavement Accelerated Facilities, Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2004.
W. D. Powell, J. F. Potter, H. C. Mayhew, M. E. Nunn, The structural design of bituminous roads. No. LR 1132 Monograph, Transport Road Research Laboratory, London, UK, 1984.
L. A. Myers, R. Roque, B. E. Ruth, C. Drakos, Measurement of Contact Stresses for the Different Truck Tire Types to Evaluate their Influence on Near-Surface Cracking and Rutting, Transp. Res. Rec. 1655(1) (1999) 175–184.
R. Blab, Introducing Improved Loading Assumptions into Analytical Pavement Models Based on Measured Contact Stresses of Tires, Paper presented at the International Conference on Accelerated Pavement Testing, Reno, NV, USA, 1999.
M. De Beer, C. Fisher, Stress-In-Motion (SIM) system for capturing tri-axial tyre-road interaction in the contact patch, Measurement 46(7) (2013) 2155–2173.
G. Wang, R. Roque, Three-Dimensional Finite Element Modeling of Static Tire-Pavement Interaction, Transp. Res. Rec. 2155(1) (2010) 158–169.
D. Grellet, G. Doré, J. P. Bilodeau, Comparative study on the impact of wide base tires and dual tires on the strains occurring within flexible pavements asphalt concrete surface course, Can. J. Civ. Eng. 39(5) (2012) 526–535.
D. B. Casey, G. D. Airey, J. R. Grenfell, Three-Dimensional Truck Tire Contact Pressures and Key Pavement Strains for a Thin Pavement. No. 16-0453. Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting, Washington DC, USA, 2016.
L. Du Plessis, A. Ulloa-Calderon, J. T. Harvey, N. F. Coetzee, Accelerated pavement testing efforts using the Heavy Vehicle Simulator, Inter. J. Pavement Res. Technol. 11(4) (2018) 327–338.
P. Yoo, I. L. Al-Qadi, M. Elseifi, I. Janajreh, Flexible pavement responses to different loading amplitudes considering layer interface condition and lateral shear forces, Inter. J. Pavement Eng. 7(1) (2006) 73–86.
Applied Research Associates, Guide for Mechanistic-Empirical Design of New and Rehabilitated Pavement Structures, Part 3: Design Analysis; Chapter 3: Design of New and Reconstructed Flexible Pavements, ARA, Champaign, IL, USA, 2004.
E. G. Fernando, D. Musani, D. W. Park, W. Liu, Evaluation of effects of tire size and inflation pressure on tire contact stresses and pavement response. No. FHWA/TX-06/0-4361-1, Texas, USA, 2006.
American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, Determining dynamic modulus of hot-mix asphalt concrete mixtures. AASHTO TP-62. AASHTO, Washington DC, USA, 2004.
A. Scarpas, A mechanics based computational platform for pavement engineering, (Ph.D. Thesis), T.U. Delft, Netherlands, 2004.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the European Commission under the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship Programme. The authors would like to thank the CAPA-3D group at TU Delft under the leadership of Prof. Tom Scarpas for their help.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Declarations
Funding: European Commission under the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship Programme
Code Availability: Finite Element modelling using CAPA-3D a program developed at TU Delft computational mechanics group
Peer review under responsibility of Chinese Society of Pavement Engineering.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Casey, D.B., Grenfell, J.R. Modelling of perpetual pavement performance subjected to varying European three-dimensional truck tire loading. Int. J. Pavement Res. Technol. 14, 588–594 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42947-020-0090-4
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42947-020-0090-4