With the goal of predicting progressive pavement distress (damage and rutting) under millions of cycles of moving vehicular loading, an efficient analysis framework is developed by combining the ideas of Fourier transform, finite element discretisation and time-scale separation. Using the simple observation of time-scale separation between evolution of pavement damage/rutting, temperature variation and traffic load variation, the analysis under millions of cycles is reduced to a few hundred analyses of stress and strain evolution under a single cycle of moving load. A new method called Fourier-finite element (FFE) method is proposed for each independent stress analysis. Essentially, Fourier analysis is used to eliminate the time dimension as well as the spatial dimension in the direction of traffic, reducing the problem to a set of two-dimensional problems, which are in turn solved using the finite element method (FEM). The FFE method is more efficient than direct three-dimensional (3D) FEM by orders of magnitude, but captures the 3D effects in an accurate manner. The FFE stress analysis technique is combined with time-scale separation-based ideas to develop a pavement performance modelling framework. A 20-year pavement simulation is presented to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed framework.
