Improving airport runway rigid pavement design using influence surfaces

Abstract This paper proposes an approach to determine cumulative damage factors (CDFs) based on Miner’s law to improve airport runway rigid pavement design. The approach uses measured aircraft wheel wander data and constructed influence surfaces. In this study, we developed an aircraft wheel wander measuring system and measured actual aircraft wheel loading locations at the Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport (SHA). We constructed influence surfaces using finite element analysis (FEA) and multivariate interpolation. We conducted FEA of a nine-slab model to simulate load transfer effects. Based on the measured wheel wander distribution and the constructed influence surface, a cumulative damage surface construction approach for CDF determination is proposed. The preliminary benefits of the proposed cumulative damage surface method are that (1) the damage caused by each load repetition is considered individually for the CDF calculation and (2) the load transfer effect is taken into account using FEA simulations. Also, the field data we collected at SHA show that, compared to normal (uniform) distribution, extreme value distribution better represents aircraft wheel wander. A comparison between the CDFs calculated using normal distribution and extreme value distribution indicates that the maximum CDF is increased by 210% using extreme value distribution. According to the several cases analyzed in this study, the proposed cumulative damage surface method typically produces smaller CDF values than those calculated using the traditional Civil Aviation Administration of China method. Traditional airport runway rigid pavement design methods could be improved and optimized in terms of accuracy and performance using the proposed cumulative damage surface method for CDF determination.