Investigating the effect of thermal gradients and traffical loads in roller compacted concrete pavement using finite element method

It has been spent big amouts of budget for design,build and maintenance of roads in all over the world.Many of the failures occurring in pavements are as results of different vehicle loads,environmental changes and poor maintenance strategies.One of the important issues that creates cracks in concrete pavement and reduces pavement loading capacity is thermal stresses caused by temperature gradients and combined streeses due to temperature gradient and traffic loads.Factors such as solar radiation,temperature changes and etc. cause thermal stresses in pavements. These stresses , alone or in combination with traffic loading, can lead to cracks in the surfaces of the pavement, which can gradually lead to the removal and destruction of concrete pavement. Therefore, research on effective parameters of this issue seems necessary. Until the advent of the finite element method, these categories of researches were carried out experimentally, which, due to their hardiness, over time, gave their place to numerical methods. In this paper, the Abqus software is used to model three-dimensional roller compacted concrete pavement and to investigate the response of this pavement under the combination of traffic and thermal loading.