DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN PACKAGE FOR• FLEXIBLE PAVEMENT DESIGN

Abstract

The application of computers for specific and isolated purposes has gradually developed into a new branch of specialized knowledge, "Computer Aided Design" this can be defined as use of computers to assist in creation, modification, analysis and optimization of a design. CAD has many advantages like huge storage facility, increased accuracy, quick retrieval and easy modifications of design.The advantages of the app lication of the CAD to Civil Engineering has now been realised and more and more design and research problems are being tackled using CAD. The problem of Flexible Pavement Design using CAD has been Belt with in this dissertation. The primary objective of flexible pavement design is to determine thickness and composition of different layers of pavement so that the pavement is strong enough to resist the action of traffic without any distress. Many softwares related to pavement design are available in International market which besides being hardware specific, can not be used in Indian conditions.Hence solution lies in development of indigenous, integrated, menu driven package. The developed package FLXPAV, is a generalised user friendly, menu driven package which designs a flexible pavement from scratch as well as the overlay over a weak flexible pavement. The design of new flexible pavement is based as per IRC-37,1984 while overlay design is based as per IRC-81,1981. Menu portion of the package is in Turbo C, while DB81, 137 are written in Fortran77. PLOI is used for platting the cross—section of pavement utilising PLOT88 graphics facility, GRA is used to display the histograms for the axle load distribution proportioning of damageing effects, gross vehicle weight distribution for the traffic data collected by observations of the axle load spectrum on the.highway. Seasonal and temperature correction factors used in overlay design, make the package more rational and scientific