ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the full-scale testing of pavements to validate designs using local materials. The tests fall into three categories, observing the behaviour of: (1) real pavements under real traffic, (2) real pavements under simulated traffic and (3) special pavements under simulated traffic. For much of the 20th-century British pavements followed Road Note 29 which was based on tests conducted on about 400 sites. The approach was effective but was inherently retrospective, and the results were often subsumed by the rapid growth in traffic. The first full-scale pavement test was conducted in 1816 by a committee of the Dublin Society. The next step was to move from relatively uncontrolled traffic loading to artificial but well-defined loadings in 1909 using a circular test track located in Detroit. One of its circulating wheels carried five simulated hooves and horseshoes, while the other was a steel-rimmed cart-wheel. In 1911, experience with the trial road sections led to the development of the Road Machine at the British National Physical Laboratory. In response to damage being caused by new motor trucks, in 1918 the US Bureau of Public Roads launched a set of road tests at Arlington, Virginia. Currently there are about 40 operating pavement testing sites around the world, and the associated technology is widely called accelerated pavement testing (APT).
