Performance of protective concrete runway pavement under aircraft impact loading

Abstract

Necessity of protective runway pavement is important to reduce the maintenance cost and avoid disruption. The study started with conducting few impact drop weight tests on small specimens of normal concrete runway pavement and a proposed fibre reinforced concrete runway pavement. The performance of the proposed fibre reinforced runway pavement specimen was proved much better than the normal concrete runway pavement specimen. A three-dimensional finite element model of this fibre reinforced runway pavement specimen was then validated using ABAQUS software. Furthermore, the performance of this improved fibre reinforced concrete runway pavement was studied in large scale under the single and multiple impact of Airbus 380. A rigorous parametric study was also carried out to explore the effects of type of aircraft, impact duration, compressive strength, tensile strength and boundary condition of runway fibre reinforced concrete pavement in changing the surface deflection.

Keywords:

• Concrete runway pavement
• fibre reinforced concrete runway pavement
• impact force
• stress contour
• surface deflection

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank University of Wollongong (UoW) and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) for providing support to carry out the work reported in this article. The authors also wish to thank the technical staffs and the IT staffs of QUT for their assistance in carrying out this research work.

Data availability

The processed data required to reproduce these findings cannot be shared at this time due to legal reasons.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.