Determining the Effect of Damping Layers in Flexible Pavements on Traffic Induced Vibrations

This paper proposes a novel method to evaluating the effect of damping layers on traffic induced vibrations; it’s based on the estimation of the Rayleigh damping coefficients of different layers to be implemented in a FEM of the pavement structure. Two commonly used methods to determining those parameters are compared and then an improved approach is introduced by considering natural frequencies of the pavement structure but without underestimating damping in the basic frequency range. In addition, a more reasonable method is proposed to calculating pavement structure vibration based on shear beam model. Finally, the results of in-situ FWD tests are used to validate the accuracy of the model; the comparison between simulation and FWD results demonstrates the accuracy of the proposed method that is acceptable.