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- Pavement Traffic Loading
- Introduction
Pavement deterioration is caused by the interacting damaging effects of traffic and the environment. Traffic loads, primarily those from heavy trucks, cause stresses/strains in pavement structures, whose effects accumulate over time, resulting in pavement deterioration, such as plastic deformation in asphalt concretes or fatigue cracking in portland concretes. Hence, truck traffic load data is an essential input to the pavement analysis and design process.
Truck traffic loads and their impact on pavements are quantified in terms of:
Number of truck axles
Configuration of these axles Their load magnitude
Axle configuration is defined by the number of axles sharing the same suspension system and the number of tires in each axle. Mul-tiple axles involve two, three, or four axles spaced 1.2 to 2.0 meters apart, and are referred to as tandem, triple, or quad, respectively. They are treated differently from single axles because they impose pave-ment stresses/strains that overlap.
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Pavement Design and Materials, A.T. Papagiannakis and E.A. Masad
copy; 2008 by John Wiley amp; Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley amp; Sons, Inc.
