Vibration Characteristics of Unsaturated Runways Under Moving Aircraft Loads

The dynamic vibrations of airport runways induced by moving aircraft loads are semi-analytically studied in this paper. The airport runway consists of an infinite Kirchhoff plate, an elastic base course, and an unsaturated poroelastic half-space. The aircraft loads are modeled according to the mechanical properties of the main landing gear of the A380 civil airliner. The governing equations of the whole system are solved in the wavenumber domain using the double Fourier transform. Then the results in the spatial domain are obtained by applying the inverse double Fourier transform. Various parameters including the observation location, soil saturation, load speed, load frequency, and pavement rigidity on the vibration characters of the whole system are investigated. It is found that all these effects are crucial, and the increase of soil saturation leads to a larger maximum vertical displacement and lower critical speed.