Effects of tire – pavement contact pressure distributions on the response of asphalt concrete pavements

The paper presents the development of a computer program VIEM for the elastic analysis of multilayered elastic pavements under the action of arbitrary tire–pavement contact pressure distributions. The techniques adapted in VIEM primarily involves the use of a two-dimensional numerical integration to integrate point load solutions over the distributed pressure after discretizing the contact area into a finite number of triangular or quadrilateral elements. Values of contact pressure are inputted at the node points of discretized area. Numerical verification of VIEM indicates that numerical solution of high accuracy can be efficiently calculated for the elastic response of multilayered asphalt pavements. As a result, the determination of displacements and stresses (strains) can be achieved using a personal computer. With the use of VIEM, a theoretical investigation is further performed to illustrate the effects of tire–pavement contact pressure distributions on the response of asphalt concrete pavements. An...