Evaluation of performance characteristics of the heavy vehicle simulator in Florida

The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) Materials Office has recently acquired a heavy vehicle simulator (HVS) and constructed an accelerated pavement testing (APT) facility which uses this HVS. An investigation was conducted to evaluate the operational performance of the HVS, and to determine its most effective test configurations for use in evaluating the rutting performance of pavement materials and/or designs under typical Florida traffic and climate conditions. Five trial runs with the HVS used a super single tire with a load of 4082 kg, tire pressure of 793 kPa and a wheel traveling speed of 12.9 km/h. These five trial runs used different combinations of wheel traveling direction (uni-directional or bi-directional), total wheel wander and wander increments. The uni-directional loading was found to be a more efficient mode for evaluation of rutting performance using the HVS. As compared with the bi-directional loading mode, the uni-directional mode produced substantially higher rut depths for the same number of wheel passes and also for the same testing time duration. When the bi-directional loading with no wander was used, imprints of the tire treads were observed on the wheel track. It was found that using a loading mode with wander smoothened out the imprints of the tire treads considerably. The uni-directional loading mode with 10 cm wander using 2.5 cm increments was selected to be used for evaluation of rutting performance based on consideration of testing efficiency and realistic rutting results.