Sensitivity quantification of airport concrete pavement stress responses associated with top-down and bottom-up cracking

Abstract The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) rigid pavement design standard employs the NIKE3D-FAA software to compute critical pavement responses of concrete airport pavement structures. NIKE3D-FAA is a modification of the original NIKE3D three-dimensional finite element analysis program developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) of the U.S. Department of Energy, and is currently used in the FAA’s FAARFIELD program. This study evaluated the sensitivity of NIKE3D-FAA rigid pavement responses with respect to top-down and bottom-up cracking. The analysis was conducted by positioning a Boeing 777-300ER (B777-300ER)aircraft at different locations (interior, corner, and edge of slab) as baseline while varying other NIKE3D-FAA inputs, including rigid pavement geometric features, mechanical properties of paving and foundation materials, equivalent temperature gradient and thermal coefficient of Portland Cement Concrete (PCC) layers. Several sensitivity charts were developed by examining the sensitivity of critical pavement responses to each input variation. Sensitivity evaluations were performed using a normalized sensitivity index (NSI) as the quantitative metric. Using such sensitivity evaluation, the most significant NIKE3D-FAA input parameters for generating an effective synthetic database that will lower computational cost for future modeling developments were identified.