Technical Note on: The Reliability in Using Standard Pavement Sections Based on Traffic Loading Categories with Wide Ranges

Abstract

Some regional and international pavement design manuals, mainly based on the empirical approaches, recommend using standard pavement design sections, in which each section represents a range of traffic loading values
and a range of subgrade stiffness values. Considering one pavement design section for a range of traffic loadings, means that all of the loading magnitudes within this range have the same effect. All of these Codes/standards or most of them developed those designs using empirical design approaches. The TRL Road Note 31 is the most known one
worldwide and has been used in different countries. Some countries have developed their own design catalogues based on the RN 31. This Technical Note, using a mechanistic-empirical approach, is examining and
investigating the reliability in using standard pavement design sections for a wide range of traffic loading values in some of these methods, and to assess to which extent this might result in having weak design sections for
loading magnitudes at the end point of the loading range, or overdesign for those ones in the beginning of the loading range. The Asphalt Institute M-E Design approach has been used representing the Mechanistic-Empirical
design approach. The Road Note 31 Design catalogue and Kenya Pavement Design catalogue have been used representing these standard designs with wide range of loading.