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Corresponding Author

EL-Badawy, Sherif

Subject Area

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Article Type

Original Study

Abstract

For material characterization, the new Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) has 3 input levels. Level 1 input values must be obtained through direct laboratory testing. Level 2 inputs are determined by the application of correlations with other material properties. Finally, Level 3 inputs are simply typical default values. The level chosen for each design input parameter, however, may have a significant effect on project design, costs, and reliability. In this paper, the influence of the unbound granular base material characterization input level on pavement performance as predicted by MEPDG for a typical flexible pavement section was investigated. For this purpose, analyses were made for three weather stations representing different climatic regions in Egypt: Alexandria, Cairo and Aswan. For the typical pavement system, level 1 data for the resilient modulus based on measured laboratory values (k1, k2, and k3 elastic response coefficients) were used for the first set of MEPDG runs. The second set of computer simulation runs were conducted using correlation from California Bearing Ratio (CBR) values. The final set of runs, utilized default resilient modulus values of the unbound base material based on the AASHTO class. MEPDG predicted pavement distresses for the three input levels were compared and the results showed variation in performance due to the change in the input level.

Keywords

MR; CBR; MEPDG; performance; k1; k2; k3

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