Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Civil Engineering

Pavement design methodologies have over the past decades seen philosophical evolutions and eventually practical implementation of new postulates. As more contributions are made by pavement researchers to the State-of-the-Art in pavement design, there exist a chasm between pavement engineers and state-of-the-art pavement research in terms of incorporation into pavement design guidelines. In developing countries such as Guyana in South America, as well as several departments of transportation, municipalities and townships in the United States, pavement engineers still use the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Pavement Design Guide (1993). This empirical pavement design guide and its previous iterations were based primarily on data that was collected and processed from the then American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) Road Test conducted between 1958 and 1960. The limitations with continued use of this method are obvious since the data was gathered under specific environmental conditions, a specific subgrade type, and with specific materials as well as specific pavement cross-sections. The continued use of this guide does not account for advances in material technology, different types and volumes of vehicular traffic, changing climatic conditions and also can be costly in expanding road networks. To solve this dilemma pavement researchers started working toward a more mechanistic approach for design and through the work of National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), culminated in the publishing of the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) in 2004. The finite element model used in the MEPDG is premised upon a displacement based theory. These theories are capable of making good predictions regarding global responses such as displacements and sometimes in-plane stresses but not the transverse stress distribution. To predict transverse stress distribution, stress based theories are more su (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: William Wolfe PhD (Advisor); Tarunjit Butalia PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Frank Croft PhD (Committee Member); Fabian Tan PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Civil Engineering; Transportation