Evaluation of Effective Thickness of Bituminous Block Pavement Using Finite Element Approach

Bituminous blocks are utilized for road construction all over the world in the name of historical pavement. Bituminous block pavement has a number of advantages in terms of faster construction and maintenance of road projects. The performance of any pavement structure is generally influenced by the thickness of the layer provided, which is determined by the structural and physical properties of the materials available for construction. Only a few experimental experiments on bituminous block pavement have been conducted. No studies were reported on the effective thickness of bituminous block pavement using the finite element technique. The multiple constraints associated with conducting experimental work on bituminous blocks of different thicknesses can be reduced by employing a finite element technique. Bituminous block pavement was tested in this study by altering the thickness, which was fixed according to the code specification. The bituminous block pavement thicknesses employed in this investigation were 50 mm, 55 mm, 60 mm, and 65 mm. ABAQUS software was used to perform a finite element study of the bituminous block pavement. The analysis showed that as pavement thickness increases, the deformation values decrease. The minimum and maximum deformation obtained is about 8–24% and 7–17%, respectively. The effective thickness of the bituminous block pavement was fixed based on the strain values obtained from the finite element approach.