Airfield Pavement Damage Evaluation Due to New-Generation Aircraft Wheel Loading and Wander Patterns

This paper presents a stress-history-based approach to predict the deformation basins of airport pavements subjected to heavy aircraft loading applied in sequential wanders. Multi-depth deflectometer data from full-scale aircraft landing gear tests conducted at the National Airport Pavement Test Facility built by the Federal Aviation Administration are used to create individual pass residual deformation transverse profiles. The computed residual deformation profiles are further corrected for stress-history effects to predict rut in the selected test sections. The developed model focuses on using the previous load location and stress history of the soil element to develop the deformations in that element. Despite the unavailability of the surface transverse profile data measured in the field at different passes, the initial attempt of the model can closely predict the deformation profile similar to width and shape expected in the field. And after the stress-history effects are accounted for, the initially calculated rut depth decreases significantly to match the final contour basin of the test sections extracted from the post traffic trenching. The advantage of using the stress-history-effects-based rut prediction tool is that it can allow any combination of wander positions and sequences of load applications to be accounted for their effects on the final surface rut development.