Potential Benefits of APTF for Evaluation of Flexible Pavement for Its Permanent Deformation Behaviour

More than 95 % of road network in India is made up of flexible pavement, especially due to the relative lesser initial cost, ease of construction and maintenance. The design of flexible pavement in India is done with criteria of load associated fatigue cracking and permanent deformation (rutting). While design methods try to consider these failure modes, more rational inputs based on intrinsic evaluations are required for better and improved designs. The Accelerated Pavement Testing Facility (APTF) is regarded as a versatile tool all over the world in pavement evaluation and performance monitoring due to its advance evaluation capabilities within a short time. This paper presents the rutting performance characteristics of a typical flexible pavement built as per Indian design practice, evaluated using APTF. APTF is capable of evaluation with regard to total structural ability of a pavement based on number of standard axle load passes which represents time period and load sustainability of a pavement with respect to defined failure criteria. The pavement was instrumented with interfacial response monitoring, wherein deflections were effectively measured using state of art instrumentation technique. The study result and possible rutting mechanism under the operational capabilities of APTF and test condition have been discussed in the paper.