Sensitivity of Pavement ME Design? to Climate and Other Factors

摘要

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ Guide for Mechanistic-Empirical Design of New and Rehabilitated Pavement Structures (MEPDG) and its supporting software,Pavement ME Design?, have challenged pavement designers to more thoroughly consider climatic,material and traffic inputs in order to evaluate a pavement design. Additionally, designers are now alsotasked with evaluating pavement performance prediction outputs such as rutting and cracking rather thansimply a structural number.In 2008, under the auspices of the Transportation Association of Canada’s Pavements and Soils andMaterials Standing Committees, a Canadian MEPDG User Group was formed as a discussion forum onchallenges and implementation issues associated with this new pavement design methodology. As part ofthe work of that group and as a way to become more fluent with the software, trial flexible pavementdesigns were performed across Canada.This paper presents the results of those trial designs and highlights some of the findings for variousweather stations across Canada. The results help demonstrate and validate the influence of asphalt cementgrade, asphalt layer thickness and truck traffic volume on pavement performance and provide some insightinto the effect of those parameters within the MEPDG.