For a robust pavement design, it is essential to collect detailed and site-specific axle load data from the field. It will be useful if one could use methodologies to handle the large amount of axle load data while carrying out pavement design. As of now in most of the pavement design procedures throughout the world, the axle load spectra are assumed to follow a uniform distribution for the ease of computation. However, the interesting insights one can have about axle load data can be taken into account if a detailed statistical analysis is carried out. In most design procedures that are followed throughout the world, static axle load data is considered for estimating damage and designing the pavements. However, it is understood that when a truck traverses over a pavement, the actual load transferred from the tire to the pavement is dynamic in nature and is usually greater than the static load. Therefore, one should consider dynamic load for designing pavements. A range of dynamic load values and the corresponding stress and strain values can be expected depending on vehicle maneuvers, roughness of the pavement, vehicle design and loading conditions. Moreover, the pavement damage estimated using such dynamic loads will be more than that calculated using static load. Therefore, one should compute the distresses associated with such dynamic loads. For this purpose, the reliability associated with the distress equations needs to be analysed as variation in design factor (dynamic load) is to be addressed.

The main focus of this Real Money Rummy proposal seminar is on the axle load data collection and describing such data using different statistical distributions. The site-specific axle load data was found to possess two well defined peaks and hence bi-modal distributions were used to describe the data. The study also attempts to describe the upper-tail region (especially overloaded axles) of axle load spectra using extreme value distributions as such axles play a critical role in pavement damage.

In the second seminar, the work related to dynamic load transfer from the tire to pavement as well as the pavement damage due to such dynamic loads will be discussed in detail. The influence of vehicle maneuvers, loading conditions of truck, speed and pavement conditions in terms of roughness in the dynamic load transfer and pavement damage will be explained.