Influence of the Asphalt Mix Resilient Modulus on Airport Pavement Design Life

Case Study of Vale Do Taquari Regional Airport

Abstract

With aviation developing new aircrafts, airport pavements need to follow developments together, to guarantee resistance to landing and take-off solicitation. The Federal Administration Aviation (FAA) has been developing dimensioning methods for airport pavements that are increasingly appropriate for the concepts of pavement mechanics. In the past, pavement dimensioning was based on a type aircraft, through which all airport traffic was converted to that aircraft, and thus, abacuses were used to define the pavement thickness value. Currently, the FAA method uses software called FAARFIELD for dimensioning the pavement, abandoning a method purely empirical with abacuses and type aircraft and inserting mechanistic-empirical concepts for a set of aircraft through a computational modeling to estimate the pavement damage. For this article, a pavement for the studied airport was initially designed and, subsequently, was carried out an analysis of the influence of the resilient modulus of the asphalt surface on the design life of the structure. The results showed that a variation from 1000 MPa to 5000 MPa in the resilient modulus of the surface can increase the design life of the pavement by approximately 21 years, considering an aircraft composition with the ATR 42 being the largest.