Heavy vehicle simulator experiment on a semi-rigid pavement structure of a motorway

For the evaluation of the existing design for a semi-rigid pavement of the A2 motorway at Poznan, Poland, a comprehensive test program was carried out, comprising a HVS experiment on two instrumented test fields. The pavements on the test sites were instrumented with strain gauges, soil pressure cells and deflection gauges in order to assess the primary response under the load and to compare these response measurements with values calculated from theoretical pavement models. The accelerated loading of both test fields was performed by means of the Nordic Heavy Vehicle Simulator (HVS), which was brought to the test site from Finland. Accelerated loading tests took place from July to September 2002. During construction of the test pavements as well as during the load application deflection measurements with the Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) were performed periodically. After the loading period final deflection measurements were conducted and material samples were taken from the pavement layers for concluding laboratory tests. The present report describes the pavement construction at the test fields, the instrumentation of the test pavements, the principle of the HVS equipment and the general program of the measurements and the laboratory tests. In its second part the report deals with the data analysis of FWD measurements that were combined with response measurements from the instrumented test fields. Based on analytical calculations the most realistic ranges of the elastic modulus of the pavement layers, especially of the cement treated base layers as the main bearing element, were determined and used for comparative pavement design calculations.