A systematic review of structural design methods and nondestructive tests for airport pavements

Flexible and rigid pavements are commonly built for airport pavements to support the moving loads of aircraft during the pavement design life. At the planning stage, the pavement structure, materials, aircraft loads, environmental conditions, and pavement damage models should be evaluated. Comparing with road pavement design, airport pavement structural design is unique in terms of the traffic loads supported by pavements with high load magnitude, significant tire pressure, and dynamic traffic conditions. With the transition from conventional empirical design to mechanistic-empirical approaches, the mechanistic-empirical approaches are adopted in the various computer programs as the main methods for pavement structural design. The methods developed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other approaches of airport pavement structural design are discussed in this paper to compare their analysis methodology and identify the advancement of each design method. A highlight of this paper is to examine the recent specifications for airport pavement structural design (FAA AC 150/5320–6 G) and the structural evaluation (FAA AC 150/5335–5D) released by the FAA. In addition, in order to support the maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) strategy, the pavement structural condition and material properties can be assessed by a Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) or a Heavy Weight Deflectometer (HWD) test. Future structural design of airport pavements should consider potential pavement failure patterns caused by complex gear loading types, and continuous pavement M&R using FWD or HWD tests.