ULTIMATE BEHAVIOR OF RIGID PAVEMENTS UNDER DIFFERENTSOIL EROSION SCENARIOS USING FE APPROACH

The AASHTO concrete pavement design procedure evaluates a candidate pavement design with respect to two potential failure modes: fatigue and erosion. Damage of the pavement is mostly caused by soil erosion beneath the pavement. Moisture trapped in the soil typically reduces subgrade strength and causes loss of slab support due to subbase and subgrade erosion and pumping, which results in pavement settling, faulting at joints and comer breaks. The main objective of this research is to investigate die influence of several parameters such as different scenarios and percentage numbers of soil erosion, slab dimension and slab thickness on the structural behavior of slab pavements. Furthermore, a comparison between the pavement responses resulted from the analysis in this study and the pavement responses resulted from the AASHTO design procedure was conducted. Theanalysis of the results showed that there is a significant effect of these parameters in the ultimate behavior of the rigid pavements under different soil erosion scenarios.