Revealing failure law of single-track traffic-loaded concrete airport pavement from a thermodynamic perspective

ABSTRACT

With the growth of global air traffic and the popularity of large aircraft, the design and life prediction of airport pavements have received increasing attention from scholars. However, concrete airport pavement evaluations based on cracking patterns are often uncertain. A thermodynamic-based failure analysis of the FAA Phase 4 Construction Cycle 8 (CC8) strength and fatigue traffic test is conducted in this work to investigate the failure laws of airport concrete pavements. First, this work equates concrete pavement failure to a phase transition. It converts strain data from full-scale traffic tests into state variables. Based on the Wilson theory definition of phase transition, network-free renormalisation is applied to reveal the concrete slab stressing state evolution and phase transition features. The clustering algorithm that utilises the attractor effect of phase transition points determines characteristic points. In summary, this work applies network-free renormalisation and clustering algorithms to reveal robust concrete pavement failure points, which can provide a reference for airport pavement design, assessment, and failure warning. Furthermore, this work further validates the stressing state theory and network-free renormalisation under high-speed time-varying conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Concrete airport pavement
• single-track loading
• network-free renormalisation
• clustering
• phase transition points

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data used for this paper is in the public domain.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by Scientific Research Projects of Institute of Engineering Mechanics China Earthquake administration: grant number [2020D11].