Modelling of Pavement Surface in Road Safety

Bio

Dr. Kumar Anupam is an assistant professor in the Section of Pavement Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He is actively involved in teaching courses such as Micromechanical modelling of AC, Continuum Mechanics and Pavement Construction and Maintenance. His research activities are related but not limited to performance-based big-data analytics; tire-pavement interactions and micromechanical modelling of AC.
He has been involved in several international projects which include FP7 EU projects and projects in the middle east. In national projects, he works in close cooperation with the Rijkswaterstraat, the Netherlands. He is a co-editor of Functional Pavement Design IV: Proceedings of the 4th Chinese – European Workshop on Functional pavement Design, CRC Press and Advances in Materials and Pavement Prediction: Papers from the International, CRC Press. He is an active member of the ISAP, TRB, APSE, iSMARTi and serves on the editorial board member of IJPE. Dr. Anupam holds a Bachelor’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology-Roorkee, India and PhD degree from National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Abstract

Skid resistance and rolling resistance are the key performance parameters for safe highway operations and our contribution as a pavement community in reducing the environmental carbon footprint. The influence of rolling resistance is a more crucial factor at the braking stage of a moving vehicle and it intensifies the fuel consumption of automobiles and eventually contributes to emissions of Greenhouse Gas (GHG). On the other hand, it is a challenge to minimize the rolling resistance without much compromising the aspects of pavement safety such as skid resistance. Therefore, properly balanced rolling resistance and skid resistance will increase the safety of the passengers in the vehicle while reducing the environmental impact. These performance parameters are governed by a combination of several factors and parameters in the environment, tire and pavement. Among them, ambient temperature, the rubber compounds and structure of the tire profile, tire tread design, tire contact pressure and its rolling speed, pavement temperature, the texture of the pavement and adsorption water layers significantly affect on aforementioned performance parameters. Considering, tire-related parameters, pavement-related parameters and environment-related factors, a tire-pavement interaction mechanism is often considered to be quite complex to model and thereby analyze the safety and carbon footprint. Development and simulation of realistic asphalt pavement in numerically is significantly costly, especially, when considering the modelling and computational time. However, a realistic model of pavement and tire aids to imitate and assessing the actual responses and behaviours of the particular pavement at the macrotexture level, specifically, during the tire-pavement interaction. Several researchers around the world have shown that Finite element (FE) modelling is an effective and efficient way to study the tire pavement mechanism. However, to the best of my knowledge, most of the existing FE models do not incorporate all the factors accurately. For an instance, only 2 two-dimensional (2-D) cross-sections of the tire could lead to inaccurate predictions of skid resistance and rolling resistance. The advantages and capability of the proposed model will be highlighted by comparing the tire temperature profiles which are predicted by the proposed model and by the existing 2-D staggered model.