Evaluation of Pavement Damage Due to New Tire Designs

The objective of this study is to evaluate pavement damage due to new tire designs using accelerated \npavement testing (APT) and finite element (FE) modeling. Three tire configurations were investigated in this \nstudy, including the newly developed wide-base tire (455/55R22.5), an older generation of wide-base tire \n(425/65R22.5), and the conventional dual-tire configuration. Four full-depth flexible pavement sections with three \nvarious hot-mix-asphalt (HMA) thicknesses (6, 10 and 16.5 in. [152, 254, and 420 mm]) were exposed to APT. \nThe measured tensile strains at the bottom of the HMA were compared under various tire loading conditions. A \nthree-dimensional (3D) FE model was successfully developed to predict the pavement responses caused by \nvarious tire configurations and validated by field measurements. The developed 3D FE model incorporates the \nmeasured 3D tire-pavement contact stresses, HMA linear viscoelasticity, continuous moving load, and implicit \ndynamic analysis. \nResults of pavement damage analysis indicate that the wide-base 455 tire causes greater fatigue damage \nand subgrade rutting than the conventional dual-tire assembly does when carrying the same load. However, the \nrelative damage ratios between various configurations at the same load decrease as the pavement thickness \nincreases. On the other hand, the wide-base 455 tire causes less top-down cracking, ???near-surface??? cracking, \nand HMA rutting damage than the conventional dual-tire assembly does. Generally, the results show that using \na wide-base 455 tire results in the least amount of pavement damage for an interstate road, slightly greater \ndamage for a primary road, and more damage for a local road.