Bai, Jin (2018) Design of Asphalt Overlay for Concrete Pavements. Coursework Masters thesis, University of Southern Queensland. (Unpublished)
Abstract
Asphalt overlay for the concrete pavement is a rehabilitation method to maintain rigid pavements. However, due to the change of temperature, moisture and wheel loads, cracks and joints on the concrete slabs may cause reflective cracking on the overlaying asphalt surface. Thus, new asphalt layers can crack quickly after the construction.
Considering about the negative effects of reflective cracking, normal asphalt may not have enough performance to support the long-term use of the rehabilitated pavements. Thus, in this project, the use of asphalt with high modulus are studied in computer simulations.
Finite element analysis can be used to calculate the deflections and stresses within the pavement layers, but hand calculation will cost a lot of time and is not accurate. Therefore, in this project, a computer software named EVERFE had been adopted to simulate concrete pavements with asphalt overlays. From the results of the EVERFE, the maximum deflections and stresses at variations conditions (such as different asphalt thicknesses, different concrete slabs sizes and different temperatures) were obtained and compared. Also, in in terms of these data, the life spans of the simulated pavements were estimated.
In the computer simulation, some limitations of the software had to be solved. Firstly, pavement models without asphalt layers were built. Since, the software could not deal with wheel load overlap. and results could only be provided for the deflections of concrete slabs rather than asphalt, some modifications on wheel sizes, wheels load are carried out in order to make the software accept the models and provide the desired results.
From the simulation and analysis, many factors can have effects on the performance of rehabilitated rigid pavement, such as the asphalt layers thicknesses, the sizes of concrete sizes and the pavement temperature. Also, some conditions which are not suitable for asphalt overlaying are found and illustrated.
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| Item Type: | Thesis (Non-Research) (Coursework Masters) |
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| Item Status: | Live Archive |
| Additional Information: | Current UniSQ staff and students can request access to this thesis. Please email research.repository@unisq.edu.au with a subject line of SEAR thesis request and provide: Name of the thesis requested and Your name and UniSQ email address. |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Current - Faculty of Health, Engineering and Sciences - No Department (1 Jul 2013 -) |
| Supervisors: | Nataatmadja, Andreas |
| Qualification: | Master of Engineering Sciences (Civil Engineering) |
| Date Deposited: | 08 Jul 2026 01:58 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Jul 2026 06:12 |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | asphalt overlay, concrete pavements, rehabilitation, reflective cracking |
| URI: | https://sear.unisq.edu.au/id/eprint/53215 |
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