Evaluation of fatigue and rut damage prediction methods for asphalt concrete pavements subjected to multiple axle loads

The new Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) developed under NCHRP 1-37A does away with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials-derived equivalent single axle load concept and calculates damage caused by various axle configurations directly. However, the calculation of pavement damage caused by multiple axles (tandem, tridem, etc.) is significantly affected by the summation method used to describe the response of the pavement due to the passage of a given axle type or truck configuration. In this paper, the results from different methods of accounting for the passage of a given axle group are compared using laboratory fatigue and rut data from repeated cyclic load tests. The evaluation criterion for these different summation methods was the degree of agreement with the measured laboratory performance. The results show that for fatigue damage, dissipated energy and strain area methods have an excellent agreement with the laboratory values, whereas peak and peak mid-way methods have poor agreement. This implies that it is important to consider the entire strain pulse when calculating fatigue damage under multiple axles. For rutting damage, the peak strain method has the best agreement with the laboratory values, whereas dissipated energy and peak mid-way methods underestimate the rutting damage. Finally, the MEPDG procedure for calculating the strain under multiple axles considerably underestimates the damage for both fatigue and rutting. However, model calibration in the MEPDG does improve the prediction of the damage due to multiple axles for fatigue and to a lesser extent for rutting.