Quantifying the effect of climate change on the deterioration of a flexible pavement

Abstract

Climate change raises challenges for conventional pavement design. With climate projections, deteriorations of a pavement can be analysed using the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG), under various global warming trends. The result exhibits to what extent climate change will have an impact on deteriorations of a flexible pavement. An alternative binder for the asphalt layers was considered in the simulation to investigate if a binder upgrade can mitigate the impact of possible climate change. The pavement is found to deteriorate more quickly due to temperature increase, although not very significantly. Moreover, a binder upgrade in the pavement design proved to be a possible mitigation against the effects of climate change on the chosen pavement.