The use of porous pavement as a surfacing option is continually gaining interest amongst developed countries. This results from its advantages over conventional pavement structures such as overcoming drainage related challenges (aquaplaning, excessive runoff and flooding) and noise control ability. Although, this pavement type is more expensive to construct its drainage advantages are critical to current challenges faced in premature pavement distresses. Additionally, a stronger porous pavement structure can be achieved by utilization of a stabilized base or subbase layer. Therefore, this paper examines the structural strength of porous asphalt pavement when compared to conventional flexible pavement. Therefore, using a finite element model in FE software Abaqus, pavement layers were simulated under static loading and compared with multi-layered elastic software. In this study scenarios of porous and flexible pavements were modelled using Abaqus and multi-layered elastic software; varying the thickness of the surfacing layer and stabilized base layer over a constant subgrade. Using the failure prediction model, the structural capacity of the pavement structures is measured. Thus, this paper attempts the understanding of the structural strength of porous asphalt pavement over flexible pavement.

pavement; porous; deflection; fly ash; modelling