Probabilistic and Reliability Design Procedures for Flexible Airfield Pavements

Probabilistic and Reliability Design Procedures for Flexible Airfield Pavements - Elastic Layered Method

Y. T. Chou

A procedure was developed to analyze layered elastic flexible pavement systems in terms of probability and reliability. A computer program RELIBSIA was prepared to carry out the computations. Rosenblueth method, instead of the conventional Taylor series expansion, us used to estimate the expected value and variance of the strains (dependent parameters) based on the input mean values of independent parameters, i.e., aircraft load, layer thicknesses, and material moduli. The relationships between the reliability level and the allowable strain repetition of the designed system which is established with results computed using RELIBISA provide a decision-making tool for engineers to design pavements at desired reliability level. The design can be optimized by selecting thicknesses of the bituminous concrete and the base layers so that the pavement is failed in fatigue cracking and subgrade failure at nearly the same traffic level and the same reliability level. The reliability-strain curves have steeper slopes with the bituminous concrete strain failure criterion than with the subgrade strain failure criterion, indicating that for flexible pavements designed using the Corps of Engineer's failure criteria, the design has a greater degree of uncertainty in preventing subgrade failure than fatigue cracking of the bituminous concrete surface corps. However, this may not be true in real cases because the bituminous concrete failure criteria are determined based on controlled laboratory test data which do not consider the uncertainties existing in the laboratory-to-field correlations.