Time domain backcalculation of pavement

Falling weight deflectometor (FWD) has been frequently used to evaluate structural integrity of pavement. The device applies an impulsive force on the surface of pavement and measure surface deflections at several locations including the place of loading. Although the test is dynamic, the data is regarded as pseudo-static data. According to common practice, using the peak load and the corresponding peak deflections, layer moduli are estimated in a static domain such that the measured peak deflections coincide with the corresponding calculated deflections based on the assumption of the theory of linear elasticity. This paper presents a method to back calculate layer moduli in dynamic domain such that the histories of both measured and calculated responses corresponding to the impulsive force coincide. Pavement is modeled by an axisymmetric linear elastic system. FEM is utilized coupled with Ritz vector to reduce a matrix and thus to improve computational efficiency. The backcalculation algorithm used is the Gauss-Newton method coupled with a truncated singular value decomposition.