Pavement construction and instrumentation for the Accelerated Loading Facility: interim report

The United States 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 test pavements that were used to shake down the ALF 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. This report describes the construction of the test pavements and the materials used in their construction. 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 (A).