Engineering Commons^™

A Comparison Of Nondestructive Testing Backcalculation Techniques For Rigid And Flexible Pavements, Trenton Ellis

Civil Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In designing new pavements, engineers rely on many different measures to characterize the average traffic, climate and soil conditions of the region. Of those, soil conditions are the most elusive, but are also the most crucial for designing a pavement of proper thickness and stiffness. This problem is compounded when the design is for an overlay instead of a new pavement. For overlay designs, engineers require a quantitative characterization of the strength of the existing pavement as well as the underlying soil. Especially for new Mechanistic-Empirical design procedures, direct measures and/or estimates of pavement stiffness are essential inputs. A variety …