ANN Model to Predict Joint Stiffness of White-topped Pavements Using Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) Data

Abstract

The performance of white-topping pavements depends mainly on the functionality of joints. The functionality of joints is measured in terms of its load transfer efficiency (LTE). Falling weight deflectometer (FWD) device is most commonly used to evaluate the performance of joints in the field. Joint stiffness is used as an input parameter in the finite element (FE) based software to compute the LTE. In the present study, an improvement to the existing analytical model is presented that can be used to compute the joint stiffness of white-topping pavements directly from the FWD deflection data. Further, ANN models have been developed and compared for the proposed and previously available analytical models in the literature. The joint stiffness calculated from the ANN model developed from the proposed analytical model is used as an input parameter in FE model and LTE is compared with the field studies. It is concluded that the proposed ANN model can predict the joint stiffness of white-topping pavement accurately and in addition to that, it will also reduce the computation time and cost. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Chinese Society of Pavement Engineering.