Reserve bearing capacity of asphalt pavement based on the reserve factors

To assess bearing capacity redundancy of asphalt pavement, the strength reserve factors and stiffness reserve factors are analyzed as indexes. The reserve strength is defined as the difference between allowable stress and calculated stress in asphalt pavement. And reserve strength factor is the ratio of reserve strength to allowable stress. The reserve strength of each layer will be given for different materials used in pavement layers. The reserve stiffness includes reserve permanent deformation of asphalt mixture and reserve compressive strain on top of the subgrade. In order to reflect the effect of the indexes, two asphalt pavement combinations are compared with the reserve factors. The results show that the reserve factors could help to figure out the different bearing capacity redundancy for different pavements, which contributes to analyzing the possible pavement distress.