Reformulation of the Design Procedure for Aggregate-Surfaced Airfield Pavements: Fid-Bau Portal

Reformulation of the Design Procedure for Aggregate-Surfaced Airfield Pavements

Bianchini, Alessandra / Gonzalez, Carlos R.

During military contingency operations, aircraft are required to land, taxi, and takeoff on unpaved surfaces. In some cases, operational time limitations do not allow for the construction of paved surfaces to establish airfield operations. The original flexible pavement design procedure for paved surfaces, which is based on the California Bearing Ratio (CBR) and the $α$ -factor (Alpha-factor), was extended and applied to the design and evaluation of aggregate-surfaced pavements. With the reformulation of the CBR-Alpha for the design of flexible pavements, efforts were also directed at defining a new equation for the design of aggregate-surfaced airfields. This paper focuses on the development of a new CBR-Beta procedure for the design and evaluation of aggregate-surfaced airfields. Data from previous studies conducted on aggregate-surfaced full-scale test sections were used for this purpose. The new performance curve proposed in this paper for aggregate-surfaced airfields has the same format as the equation that was proposed and accepted for flexible pavements.