Design Practice of Concrete Pavements in China

A brief review of China's practice on structural design of concrete pavements is presented. The designmethodology adopted controls the combined fatigue damage due to repeated traffic loading and fluctuating temperature gradient, and solves the loading and thermal warping stresses by using the finite element method, based on a mechanistic mo-del with thin slab on semi-infinite continuum. Itis also a probabilistic approach which introducesa reliability factor for considering the impact ofvariability level of design parameters and the de-sired levelof reliability upon pavement structuraldesign.