Sea Level Rise-Induced Asphalt Pavement Service Life Reduction
Xiao Chen, Student
Rutgers University
Abstract
Sea level rise (SLR) has been found to have great impact on the transportation infrastructure in coastal areas. To quantitatively determine the consequence of SLR, this study analyzed the pavement service life reduction under different sea levels. Areas with low, medium and high current groundwater tables (CGW) were selected for analysis. The hydro-mechanical model was adopted to analyze the responses of the pavement under different scenarios, which considers the moisture and modulus variation and the pore pressure effect. Based on the critical responses, different pavement performance models were used to calculate the number of cycles of failure for fatigue cracking and rutting. The results show that the moisture and modulus varied nonlinearly along the pavement depth. The pore pressure of water in subgrade and subbase would increase under traffic loading, while it was too low to undertake the loading and has little impact on pavement critical responses. With the rise in sea level, the pavement critical responses would increase in medium and high CGW cases, while they hardly changed in low CGW case. As a result, the SLR was found to have a significant impact on the reduction in pavement service life in coastal areas where the CGW is relatively high.
