A User Friendly Software for Rigid Pavement Design

Abstract

Concrete pavements as concrete road slab, appear as a strong alternative for flexible superstructures especially because of their low cost for maintenance and repair and the high performance they show under heavy axle loads. The design of these concrete road slabs is quite different from the traditional concrete and reinforced concrete structures’ design. In the design for this kind of pavements, traffic conditions should be defined properly and considered an addition to the concrete and platform properties. There have been designing methods developed based on both experimental and mechanic foundations for concrete pavements. The most important ones of these methods are AASHTO (1993) and PCA (1984). In both design methods, it’s significant to know the maximum deflections and maximum strains the vehicles’ loads cause on the pavement. The calculation of this maximum deflections and maximum strains can be done via the finite element method or the closed formulas which have been developed by Westergaard. In this study, a user-friendly software has been developed based on AASHTO 1993, PCA 1984 design methods and Westergaard formulas. Thanks to this software, the user who wants to design the concrete pavement as concrete road slab can obtain the essential parameters automatically by entering the required data for the design.

Keywords

• PCA1984,AASHTO 1993,Rigid pavement,Westergaard Analysis,Visual Programming

References

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