This two-part course will cover two distinct topic areas presented by Félix Doucet (Ministères des Transports du Québec) and Guy Doré (Université Laval). The course will be available in English
& French.
Félix Doucet will provide an overview of mechanistic-empirical Pavement Design with AASHTOWare’s Pavement ME design software. Félix, as one of two Canadians that participates in the AASHTO task group for Pavement ME development,
is in a unique position to share his knowledge on mechanistic design with participants.
This part of the course will be about the mechanistic–empirical design of asphalt mix pavements with the AASHTOWare Pavement ME Design software. It will mainly focus on the characteristics and the performance of asphalt mixes.
The background and an overview of the software will be reviewed. The required climate, traffic and materials inputs will be detailed according to the different levels of analysis available. As well, the design and rehabilitation
of asphalt mix pavements with the software will be explained, including an analysis of the pavement response, distress and smoothness models. Finally, the local calibration of the software will be discussed.
The course will also present the current state of implementation the software in North America, as well as the continuing improvement process for the software and the role of different stakeholder groups. The objective of the course
will not be to do pavement design per se, but to understand the inputs required depending on the design level, the types of pavement and rehabilitation possible, the determination of performance by the software and the available resources to progress.
Guy Doré is a renowned researcher in the field of cold weather paving and will share his unique perspective on specific challenges of paving and pavement performance in harsh climates. Many parts of Canada, if not all, have unique
cold-weather challenges that pavement practitioners must understand to achieve the desired performance for asphalt pavements.
In cold climates, environmental factors are responsible for an important portion of pavement deterioration; up to 50% of the deterioration on high-volume roads and as much as 80% on low-volume roads. The main factors causing road
deterioration are thermal contraction of asphalt bound layers causing thermal cracking and freeze-thaw cycles causing differential frost heave in the winter and bearing capacity loss in the spring. The problems related to freeze-thaw cycles are more severe
in areas where subgrades are composed of fine-grained, saturated materials.
This part of the course will describe the context leading to cold regions problems, identify the main factors involved and describe the effects on pavement performance. Different solutions to mitigate the problems including design
for frost heave, pavement insulation and other mitigation strategies will also be described.
