Enhanced Pavement Design and Analysis Framework to Improve the Resiliency of Flexible Airfield Pavements

Abstract

Changes in climatic conditions can directly affect pavement performance. However, accounting for environmental factors in airport pavement design remains a challenge since design methods such as FAA rigid and flexible iterative elastic layered design (FAARFIELD) do not consider moisture and temperature variation as input. Therefore, to address this research gap and improve the resilience of airport pavements, this research proposes a new methodology for the structural design of flexible airport pavements. The proposed methodology in this research was applied to a case study of an international airport in Canada, using actual field data. Five scenarios were evaluated including the current climate, temperature increase, lower matric suction, and two flooding events. The results of the proposed design method showed that the traditional FAARFIELD analysis can possibly overestimate fatigue damage, and underestimate rutting damage. The outcomes showed that climate change can increase pavement damage and shorten the service life from 7 to 14 years in the scenarios evaluated. It was also concluded that the lowering of the matric suction can result in the highest damage levels. Considering the implications of climate change on transportation infrastructure, the proposed methodology can contribute to designing more resilient airport pavements in the future, since it accounts for climate variations, temperature, and moisture changes, as well as extreme events such as flooding over the design life of flexible airport pavements.