• International Journal of Highway Engineering
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.213-224
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• 2008

Flexible pavement responses to vehicular loading, such as critical stresses and strains, in each pavement layer, could be predicted by the multilayered elastic analysis. However, multilayered elastic theory suffers from major drawbacks including spatial dimension of a numerical model, material properties considered in the analysis, boundary conditions, and ill-presentation of tire-pavement contact shape and stresses. To overcome these shortcomings, three-dimensional finite element (3D FE) models are developed and numerical analyses are conducted to calculate pavement responses to moving load in this study. This paper introduces a methodology for an effective 3D FE to simulate flexible pavement structure. It also discusses the mesh development and boundary condition analysis. Sensitivity analyses of flexible pavement response to loading are conducted. The infinite boundary conditions and time-dependent history of calculated pavement responses are considered in the analysis. This study found that the outcome of 3D FE implicit dynamic analysis of flexible pavement that utilizes appropriate boundary conditions, continuous moving load, viscoelastic hot-mix asphalt model is comparable to field measurements.