Influence of Climatic Factors on the Pavement Performance in MEPDG

As per Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), climatic factors alone contribute up to 36% and 24% in total damage to flexible and rigid pavements, respectively. Hence, it is important to understand the influence of climatic factors on pavement performance as well as the design methodologies. The existing literature evaluated the sensitivity of individual climatic and traffic factors on pavement performance. However, the sensitivity of interaction between various traffic and climatic factors could be highly significant but is least understood. The objective of this study is to evaluate the sensitivity of individuals and interactions of climatic and traffic factors on predicted pavement performance. This study considers air temperature, precipitation, wind speed, humidity, percentage sunshine, and groundwater table as the climatic factors and annual average daily truck traffic (AADTT) as the traffic factor. A fractional factorial design (27- 2) is considered to determine the statistical significance of individual and interaction factors on performance prediction. The study concluded that interaction of temperature and wind speed would be highly significant for rutting predictions, while the interaction of AADTT with temperature/windspeed would be prominent for cracking predictions.