Draft User's Guide for UDOT Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design

Validation of the new AASHTO Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide’s (MEPDG) nationally calibrated pavement distress and smoothness prediction models when applied under Utah conditions, and local calibration of the new hot-mix asphalt (HMA) pavement total rutting model, were recently completed as documented in UDOT Research Report No. UT-09.11, Implementation of the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide in Utah: Validation, Calibration, and Development of the UDOT MEPDG User’s Guide, dated October 2009. This Draft User’s Guide incorporates the findings of the model validation and local calibration report and provides information for use by UDOT’s pavement design engineers during trial implementation of the MEPDG. This information includes an overview of the MEPDG procedure, information on installation of the software, guidelines for obtaining all needed inputs, guidance to perform pavement design using the software for new and rehabilitated HMA pavement and jointed plain concrete pavement (JPCP), and pavement design examples for new HMA pavement and new JPCP using the MEPDG software. This Draft User’s Guide must be considered as preliminary as the MEPDG implementation process in Utah is not complete. The UDOT Materials Division expects to provide regular updates to this document as the MEPDG software is updated and as UDOT gains more experience with the MEPDG.