Understanding airfield pavement responses under high tire pressure: Full-scale testing and numerical modeling

This paper aims to investigate airfield flexible pavement responses under heavy aircraft loading with high tire pressure through an integration of full-scale testing and numerical modeling. The new generations of aircraft, such as Boeing 787 and Airbus 350/380, have tire pressure close to or exceeding 232 psi. Limited information is available on the effect of high tire pressure on HMA pavement responses. A new series of high tire pressure tests were conducted at the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) heavy vehicle simulator-airport version (HVS-A) Test Strips. An advanced three-dimensional (3-D) finite element (FE) model was developed that characterized the hot-mix asphalt (HMA) layer as a viscoelastic material to predict time- and temperature-dependent pavement responses under various loading conditions. The accelerated pavement testing results indicate that there is an insignificant effect of tire pressure on pavement rutting. The effect of tire pressure was more significant beyond failure (1 in. surface rut). This is consistent with the previous findings from high tire pressure tests. The numerical modeling results show that as the critical pavement responses in the asphalt layer increased slightly as tire pressure increased from 210 to 254 psi. The cross-anisotropic non-linear behavior of granular base affects the tensile strains at the bottom of asphalt layer significantly. The comparison between predicted and measured strains emphasizes the importance of considering the realistic tire-pavement interaction and the appropriate constitutive model for each pavement layer. The numerical modeling can support and supplement the full-scale testing results and provide valuable suggestions for mechanistic-based airfield pavement design under heavy aircrafts with high tire pressure.