Evaluation of subgrade and climatic zone influences on pavement performance in the Canadian Strategic Highway Program's (C-SHRP) Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) study
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abstract
Sixty-five sections in 24 provincial test sites received pavement rehabilitation comprising of various thicknesses of asphalt overlays, as part of the Canadian Long-Term Pavement Performance (C-LTPP) study, which was initiated in 1989. This paper describes the impacts of the various alternative rehabilitation treatments on pavement performance in terms of roughness progression under comparative climatic, subgrade soil, and traffic loading conditions. Some findings from this study include (i) in wet, high-freeze zones, thinner overlays show a higher rate of roughness progression than thicker overlays, regardless of subgrade type; (ii) in dry, high-freeze zones, roughness progression for medium and thick overlays is relatively small; (iii) in wet, low-freeze zones, thinner overlays combined with fine subgrade soils show the highest rate of roughness progression; and (iv) traffic, in terms of equivalent single axle loads (ESALs), seemed to have a limited effect on all of the above; this was attributed largely to the fact that all of the traffic essentially fell into one level, where 200 000 ESALs per year was designated as the boundary between low and high traffic levels. The methodology developed in this paper provides valuable insight into how subgrade and climatic factors influence pavement performance and can be applied to performance trend analysis of other pavements with similar climatic, subgrade, and traffic loading conditions.Key words: subgrade type, climatic zones, pavement roughness, international roughness index (IRI), Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP).
