Effects of overloaded commercial traffic on pavement surface layer

Abstract Road infrastructure accommodates a wide variety of vehicles, but traffic growth and overloaded vehicles present major problems, which have a negative influence on pavement performance and shorten its lifespan. As a result, the expenses associated with pavement construction and rehabilitation have increased significantly. A weigh-in-motion (WIM) device was used to gather 24-h commercial traffic axle-load data from the two national highway road sections over a 5-year period for the purpose of determining the pavement thickness and vehicle damage factor (VDF) value. This study calculates the overloaded traffic (OLT) and standard-loaded traffic (SLT) VDF values using the fourth power law, and the OLT VDF value was found to be twice as high as that of the SLT value. This research uses IRC:372018 to calculate the pavement thickness for the SLT and OLT, and the IITPAVE software validates the results. The analysis revealed that the calculated surface layer thickness of the OLT is 1.2 times higher than the calculated surface layer thickness of SLT. According to this study, the thickness of the pavement surface layer increases by 1.3 to 1.5 times, and the VDF value increases by 1.2 to 1.5 times if there are 15 per cent more overloaded vehicles. This study also concludes that if the VDF value of the vehicle increases by two times, then the pavement surface layer thickness increases about 1.5 times. This research investigates the idea that OLT is considered during the design of new pavement instead of SLT.