ABSTRACT
Understanding the stresses conditions of flexible pavement under wheel loading is critical for the undergraduate and graduate students to learn the principle of pavement design. The paper presented a simulation tool for the students to evaluate the real 3D stresses conditions of flexible pavements. The tool is developed by the implementation of Fourier-aided series Finite Element Methods in Matlab® with GUI programming method. The layered flexible pavements are meshed with 2-D eight-node quadratic elements, and the wheel loads has been approximated with an eighty items of Fourier Series. The parallel computing technology has been applied to speed up the program. It is concluded that the tool is fast and easy-to-use with high accuracy, which could be used in pavement engineering courses for the students to evaluate the load responses of flexible pavements, as well as in routine pavement design and in scientific research works.
