A new Austroads and ARRB report provides details on an ongoing study into improving the design procedures for asphalt pavements in Australia.
Improved Design Procedures for Asphalt Pavements: Outcomes for Year 2 of 3 covers a variety of topics related to the pavement design ideologies.
The report included literature reviews of perpetual pavement design concepts and the relationship between flexural and compressive modulus.
The study also included comparative laboratory flexural and compressive modulus testing.
Further work was done to validate the pavement temperature prediction models, which were developed in the first year of the three-year study. A viscoelastic analysis of asphalt pavements was also performed to assess the effect of temperature and loading time on asphalt moduli values at depth.
Off the back of the research, the report proposed changes to the Austroads test method for characterisation of flexural modulus and fatigue performance.