ABSTRACT
Concrete culverts are underground conduits located under roadways. These culverts are required to withstand soil overburden as well as vehicular surface loads. Previous studies investigated the integrity of the culverts by applying surface loads directly on top of the soil which represents the worst-case scenario. While this may be a good design practice, for realistic buried utility assessment subjected to superheavy load (SHL) vehicles, the role of existing pavement layers should be addressed. To gain insight into the performance of buried culverts under SHL vehicle, two full-scale pavement experiments were designed and carried out at the University of Nevada, Reno. A concrete culvert was buried in the subgrade of a typical pavement structure constructed in 10×10×7 ft box. Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) loads ranging from 9,000 to 27,000 lb were applied on top of the asphalt concrete layer. This paper describes the experiment and presents the captured culvert performance.
