Structural Functional and Economic Analysis of Jointed Plain Concrete Pavements

This paper presents a structural, functional and economic evaluation model for Jointed Plain Concrete Pavement (JPCP). The model was implemented by using a computer program developed by the authors at the Department of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering of University of Rome “La Sapienza”. This paper will describe this versatile, simple and user friendly tool for concrete pavement analysis: this tool allows the study of stresses and strains under thermal and traffic load, the estimation of construction and maintenance costs, in order to get a feasibility study and economic sustainability analysis of concrete pavements. This software has two functions related to life cycle analysis of JPCP: it examines the effects of subgrade soil, clime, materials, traffic distribution and geometric characteristics on stress-strain state of concrete slabs and it estimates cumulative life-cycle construction and maintenance costs. Pavement performance during service life is estimated by fatigue damage, International Roughness Index and transversal cracking. Construction and maintenance preventive and/or corrective works will contribute to the total cost to be supported by the community. This new approach to JPCP design allows comparing rigid pavements through a synthetic economic indicator: the Present Value, calculated using the annual discount rate and the annual inflation rate.