PAVEMENT TESTING FACILITY--DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION. INTERIM REPORT

The U.S. Accelerated Loading Facility (ALF), a full-scale accelerated pavement testing machine, has been installed at the Pavement Testing Facility (PTF) at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center (TFHRC). This report describes the design and construction of the two PTF test pavements, the materials used in their construction, and the associated pavement instrumentation and data acquisition system. The two test pavements contain hot-mix asphalt concrete with a crushed-aggregate base. The pavements were designed to carry 250,000 and 3,500,000 18-kip ESAL. Instrumentation was designed to automatically record pavement deflection, strain, temperature, surface profile, and wheel load. Software modules to acquire, reduce, and store the data in standard computer file format were developed.