Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-2011

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Civil Engineering

Major Professor

Baoshan Huang

Committee Members

Edwin G. Burdette, Stephen Richards, Alberto Garcia

Abstract

The performance of different pavement maintenance treatments were evaluated by investigating practical projects collected from Tennessee Pavement Management System (PMS) and Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) database. The influence of factors on the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and cracking initiation of different treatment were evaluated by “Optime”, multiple linear regression and parametric survival analysis. Pavement roughness, pavement serviceability index (PSI) and the initiation time of cracking were used as pavement performance indicators.

Investigation on the pavement maintenance projects in Tennessee by Optime and multiple linear regression analysis indicated that HMA overlay had the highest effectiveness, followed by mill & fill and micro surfacing. Due to the relatively low cost, micro surfacing was the most cost-effective treatment, followed by HMA overlay and mill & fill. The effectiveness and cost-effectiveness decreased with the increase of traffic level and pre-treatment pavement condition.

Investigation on the LTPP resurfacing treatments indicated that thick overlay and milling reduced the roughness after rehabilitation. Thin overlay, high traffic level and poor pre-rehabilitation pavement condition increased the deterioration rate of new overlay. Using reclaimed asphalt material did not influence the treatment performance but was cost-effective in reducing the roughness of new overlay. For a certain deterioration rate, there was an optimized pre-rehabilitation roughness value or time for applying maintenance treatment.

Survival analysis on the crack initiation of asphalt overlay indicated that high traffic level accelerated the initiation of cracking. Thick overlay delayed the initiation of cracking except for the non-wheel path longitudinal crack. Mill retarded the occurrence of the non-fatigue cracks, whereas severe freeze thaw condition accelerated the occurrence of the two types of cracking. Using 30% RAP accelerated the initiation of longitudinal fatigue crack on wheel path but did not cause serious fatigue problem.

The performance curves of HMA resurfacing treatments used in Tennessee were calibrated by investigating the influence of different factors on the slopes and intercepts of post-treatment performance curves. The analysis indicated that pavement with high pre-treatment PSI, thick overlay and deep milling had low deterioration rate, whereas pavement with higher traffic level deteriorated faster.

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