Effects of Wheel Diameter Changes on Stress and Strain of Flexible Pavements

The objective of all the flexible pavements design methods is that the designed pavement should sustain effective factors. Inter alia, the important effective factors include pavement conditions and states. The designed pavement plays two significant roles in relation with stresses and deformations. Stresses should decrease to such a level that firstly, they are tolerable for the subgrade and secondly, they cause no structural damage in the pavement. In order to actualize this, all the effective ideas should be utilized and effective parameters should be identified and carefully assessed. In this paper, the flexible pavement structure has been modeled using the finite element Abacus software and the effect of tire diameter variations on stresses and strains are studied. This pavement was under a load having circular section and a magnitude of 4.5 ton. Four different diameters were selected for the loading surface and four important parameters having the most effect in coasing defect in the flexible pavements were inspected. Due to the analysis of the models, it was observed that the response of the pavement to each loading surface was different.