Improvements to the materials characterization and fatigue life prediction methods of the Texas rigid pavement overlay design procedure

Certain improvements to the Texas Rigid Pavement Overlay Procedure (RPOD2) with regard to materials characterization and fatigue life predictions are presented. Suggestions are made for characterizing rigid pavement layers from Dynaflect deflections and material tests, and some guidelines for selecting design sections along the length of a road are presented. Finite element analysis is used to quantify the effect of pavement discontinuities on the tresses obtained from layered theory. Further finite element analysis is used in an attempt to relate the critical reflection stresses in an ac overlay to deflection measurements obtained before overlaying.