Effect of Dowel Looseness on Response of Jointed Concrete Pavements Using Three-Dimensional Finite Element Analysis

Abstract

This paper evaluated an effect of dowel looseness on response of jointed concrete pavement using 3D finite-element analyses of rigid pavement systems that relies on an embedded formulation of a beam element. This embedded element allows the efficient modelling of dowel looseness using nodal contact approach and permits the dowels to be exactly located irrespective of the slab mesh lines. These studies indicate that significant reduction in load transfer efficiency and increase in both slab and base course stresses can be expected due to small gaps varies from 0.25 to 1.25mm between the dowels and the slabs. For the worst case the LTE were reduced to 11.3% and 11.6% respectively for single wheel loading and odd dual wheel loading case while there were voids present at the base course layer for 1.25 cases 4.