Pavement design & Sensitivity Analysis of Moscow Pullman

Regional Airport (PUW) Using FAARFIELD 1.42

Abstract:

FAARFIELD is an acronym that stands for “FAA Rigid and Flexible Iterative Elastic Layered Design,” which
belongs to the category of mechanistic-empirical pavement design procedures, meaning that it
combines continuum-mechanics based analysis of stresses and strains within a layered pavement
structure with empirically-derived failure models to produce a design. In the case of FAARFIELD, the
failure models are based on analysis of full-scale traffic tests, including the most recent series of full-
scale tests performed by the FAA at the National Airport Pavement Test Facility (NAPTF), located at the
FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center (WJHTC) near Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA. All structural
analysis within FAARFIELD is performed using two subprograms: LEAF (“Layered Elastic Analysis – FAA”)
and NIKE3D-FAA. The latter is a three-dimensional finite element (3DFE) analysis program originally
developed in the Fortran programming language by the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (Maker 1995), but which has undergone substantial revision and transformation by
the FAA to make it suitable for FAA design requirements. In FAARFIELD, finite element programming is
used exclusively for new rigid pavements and overlays on rigid pavements, due to the noncontinuous
nature of the analysis domains (i.e., the need to consider joints and slabs of finite dimensions). Flexible
designs, on the other hand, use the continuous layered elastic models in LEAF. In FAARFIELD, the two
structural analysis subprograms LEAF and NIKE3D-FAA account for the large majority of the
computational time requirements during actual design.

Objective:

1) To determine the thickness of airport for the following categories for a set of traffic volume,
material properties and climatic condition.
a) New Flexible Pavement
b) New Rigid Pavement
c) Overlays- i) HMA over flexible pavement
ii) HMA over rigid pavement
iii) PCC over rigid pavement
2) To execute sensitivity analysis due to traffic volume, material properties and climatic conditions
for the categories mentioned above.