PAVEMENT ENGINEERING

Academic Year 2020/2021 - 1° Year - Curriculum Ingegneria dei trasporti
Teaching Staff: Salvatore CAFISO and Alessandro SEVERINO
Credit Value: 6
Scientific field: ICAR/04 - Highways, railways and airports
Taught classes: 28 hours
Exercise: 30 hours
Term / Semester:

Learning Objectives

This course will provide students knowledge and skills relevant to asphalt materials and pavement design and maintenance, including material selection and characterization, mix design of asphalt concrete, design of pavement layers using both empirical and mechanistic methods, performance evaluation of existing pavements using visual inspection, manual system, high speed equipment and instrumented vehicles, and laboratory testing of materials.


Course Structure

Lectures, tutorials, exercises, and project work.


Detailed Course Content

Traffic, environmental conditions, soil and drainage

Weather and Environment factors. Traffic and load distribution concepts. Load Equivalency Factors. Subgrade, Subbase, Drainage. Soil stabilization concept and methods.

Material characterization and asphalt mix design

Historical background. Pavement performances. Pavement Type: Flexible pavement, Rigid pavement, Special Pavement: Draining-Sound Absorbent, Composite. Asphalt Concrete. Properties and characteristics of binders and aggregates. Laboratory material characterization. Viscoelastic nature of asphalt and direct measure of stiffness. Types, properties and design of asphalt mixes. Marshall and Superpave mix Design. Harmonized European Specifications.

Structural design

Resilient modulus, Dynamic modulus of asphalt concrete. Fatigue cracking, Rutting and permanent deformation. Pavement performance and analysis period. Pavements catalogs. Empirical Methods. Mechanicistic-Empirical Methods.

Maintenance and rehabilitation

Maintenance and rehabilitation of asphalt pavement. Pavement Management Systems (PMS). Pavement Survey. Nondestructive tests. Bearing capacity, Unevenness, Skid resistance and surface texture, visual evaluation of Distress. Overlay design.


Textbook Information

American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials – AASHTO (1993). Guide for Design of Pavement Structures, 4th Edition.

American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials – AASHTO (2008). Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide.

Huang Y. H. (2003). Pavement Analysis and Design. Prentice Hall.

Mallick R. B., El-Korchi T. (2008). Pavement Engineering. Chapman and Hall/CRC.