Dynamic Analysis of FWD Data for Pavement Evaluation

Abstract

The falling weight deflectometer (FWD) is widely used for nondestructive pavement evaluation. Most applications in current practice use the peak displacements from the geophones to backcalculate pavement layer moduli. Limited application has been made of dynamic analysis, which uses the load and displacement histories that are easily obtained from the FWD. This paper illustrates the application of dynamic analysis using a pavement model that characterizes a given material as viscoelastic or damped elastic. To illustrate the application of dynamic analysis, FWD data from a number of sites were analyzed to predict material properties and depths-to-bedrock. The predicted depths were found to be in fair agreement with the reported values from soil borings made at the sites. For the covering abstract see ITRD E118503.