ABSTRACT
Bearing capacity is a key index in pavement management systems in many countries. Current assessment of the bearing capacity tends towards fast and continuous measurements at traffic speed. The conventional evaluation using stationary loads do not represent real traffic loading condition; therefore the results will inevitably lead to discrepancies from reality. In this paper a specific computational program SAFEM is proposed for evaluation of the bear capacity of asphalt pavements under traffic loads. A field experiment was carried out by using a passing truck, geophones and a Mobile Load Simulator to validate the efficiency of SAFEM. The investigation shows the variation tendency of the back-calculated bearing capacity has a quite good negative relation with the number of loading cycles in the experiment. As a result, the SAFEM is feasible to be used for the fast and reliable analysis of the pavement bearing capacity at a network level for road administrations.
