Computer Aided Design for Flexible Pavements of Concrete Bricks

This paper describes computer aided design (CAD) software and methods employed for effective design of flexible pavements with concrete bricks. Pavements consisting of concrete bricks allow many different patterns to be used. An area which is to be paved with concrete bricks is divided into a number of subdomains which in turn can be paved with different patterns, such that the resulting pattern for the composite area can be relatively complex. Each pattern consists of a family of bricks with certain shapes and colours. For certain areas it may be necessary to change colours of individual bricks in order to obtain particular visual effects. For complex patterns and areas with irregular boundaries the design of pavements becomes quite tedious and thus there is a need for CAD software that automates the time-consuming work associated with drawings and price calculation. A special CAD software has been developed with these capabilities. A kernel for geometric modelling with polygons was developed. The generation of patterns for individual domains is based on spatial decomposition in combination with buffering of patterns. This makes it relatively simple to achieve effective visualization of the domain with the chosen patterns and to calculate the number and types of bricks used. It also makes it relatively easy to use special patterns along the boundaries of a domain. The modelling procedure is described in detail. The paper demostrates that design of pavements with concrete bricks can be effectively performed with CAD software.