Vehicle-Pavement Interaction (VPI) is a central problem to highway and airport pavement design. It also has a profound impact on infrastructure management, vehicle suspension design, and the nation?s economy. This project will provide novel approaches and ideas for pavement surface roughness characterization, vehicle random vibration, and dynamic pavement behaviors under vehicular loads, and unify them into a coherent scheme for applications in structural health monitoring (SHM), vibration mitigation (VM), nondestructive evaluation (NDE), and vehicle weigh-in-motion (WIM). The proposed solution will be developed with interaction with other disciplines in a global approach. The CAREER proposal is an integrated and interdisciplinary research effort including methodological, analytical, numerical and experimental work across the full spectrum of elastodynamics, random vibration, statistical science, computer simulation and infrastructure management. This research will add new scientific knowledge to the subject by providing better understanding of VPI, new avenues for novel sensing and information processing principles, and a foundation for developing a far-sighted research program with long reach.
Intellectual Merit: the main outcomes of this project are 1) the establishment of a methodological foundation that systematically integrates pavement surface roughness, vehicle vibration, and dynamics of pavement structure systems as a whole; 2) the development of a software toolkit to automate modeling and simulation of vehicle vibration and to analyze dynamic pavement response under various dynamic loads; 3) an improved quantitative understanding on effects and mechanisms of various factors on dynamic response of pavement structure systems; and 4) the revealing of fundamentals of VPI and its applications to improve accuracy and reliability of SHM, NDE and WIM and to innovate landmark methods in these applications. The engineering science field would be advanced as a result of this work due to having better models to predict dynamic pavement response under vehicular loading for improving pavement design and the creation of new areas of long-term research and continuous development in SHM, NDE and WIM.
Broader Impacts: This research will benefit the research community, the transportation industry, and the society as a whole. The impact of the proposed work is broad and high not only from scientific research and economic perspectives but also from an educational standpoint. CUA is located in Washington, DC, with its unique combination of diverse cultures. Thus the student body is featured by diversity. Full participants in this proposed project include underrepresented minorities, women, and international students. Graduate and undergraduate students involved in this project will gain cross-disciplinary exposure and experience with state-of-the-art experimental techniques and analytical skills. The use of sensor technology for experiment and field test and the emphasis on innovative applications of numerical modeling and computer simulation provide a unique opportunity for outreach to students and the industry. From this project, a substantial quantity of the materials will be made available on the internet and disseminated in conference and journal publications.
