Impact of flood hazards on pavement performance

ABSTRACT

Pavement infrastructure is experiencing unanticipated climate conditions due to global warming. Extreme weather events, such as excessive precipitations, are increasing in intensity and frequency under climate change, which pose a flood risk to pavement infrastructure. The impact of flooding on pavements has become a rising concern since pavements are designed based on historical data, which do not adequately reflect current and future climate. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of the flooding impacts on pavements is of great importance. The objective of this study is to analyse the impact of flooding on pavement performance. Damage pattern, flood characteristics, impact factor analysis and a case study were performed. The Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide is employed to simulate the effect of 36 extreme hydrologic events on 2 typical pavement designs in Ontario, Canada. Extreme precipitation magnitude, number of event cycles and duration were loaded on typical pavement structures. Results show that there is no significant damage caused by short-duration exposure of extreme precipitation, and extreme events contribute to international roughness index changes. The increase of the number of event cycles leads to the increase of damage ratio. In addition, the loss of pavement life is unneglectable for long duration and higher cycle extreme events.

KEYWORDS:

• Pavement performance
• climate change
• extreme precipitation
• flood hazard
• Canada

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Norman W. McLeod Chair Partners, and Centre for Pavement and Transportation Technology (CPATT) Partners.