Consideration of Seasonal Temperature Changes in the French Pavement Design Method : Chapter 1
Résumé
Summary Road structures consist of multiple layers. Different types of road structures are as follows: flexible structures, thick bituminous structures, semi-rigid structures, mixed structures, rigid structures, and inverted structures. The French pavement design method combines theoretical pavement mechanical calculations, the results of laboratory modulus and fatigue tests on treated pavement materials,and data from feedback from full-scale experiments. The stiffness and fatigue performance of bituminous materials vary with temperature. The chapter is concerned with the presentation of equivalent temperatures calculated by this new procedure and the consequences upon bituminous pavement design. A method of incremental damage calculation with fixed time steps, which takes into account the real temperature variations throughout the year obtained from instrumented pavement sections, was developed and implemented in the V.1.5.1 version of the pavement design software Alize-LCPC. Equivalent temperature, as understood in the French pavement design method, is calculated for the SERUL site, using daily temperature data measured in the pavement.