Incorporating Risk of Failure into Maintenance Management of Cracks in Runway Pavements

Abstract

priorities of cracks. For instance, cracks of similar dimensions but in different locations (in either longitudinal or transverse direction, or both) of the runway could have different implications to aircraft operations and logically should have different priorities for maintenance. Therefore, there is a need for further refinement to the conventional approach for prioritizing pavement cracks for runway maintenance management.In response to the above-mentioned need for improvement, this paper proposes to incorporate the concept of failure risk into the maintenance planning for runway pavement cracks. It is common practice to seal all cracks immediately upon detection to slow further deterioration. Thereafter, a decision is still necessary concerning the follow-up structural-related maintenance action, such as partial-depth or full-depth patching. A methodology is presented in this study to compute the structural failure risks of individual cracks, while taking into consideration the dimensions and characteristics of cracks (including depth), as well as the frequency of landings and takeoffs by aircraft type and statistical distributions of their wheel loadings during landings and takeoffs, touchdown points, and lateral wanders. The failure risk of each crack is analyzed by using a theoretically sound mechanistic approach by means of the finite element method. With Miner's rule (5), failure risk is expressed on a scale of positive real values, and it can be directly used for assignment of maintenance priority. The detailed steps of the proposed methodology are described in this paper, and a numerical example is presented to demonstrate application of the methodology. METHODOLOGY FOR FAILURE RISK EVALUATION Calculation of Failure RiskIn this paper, the presentation focuses on cracks in asphalt pavements. However, the methodology is also applicable to concrete pavements. The evaluation of failure risk begins from typical maintenance survey records of pavement condition with which visible cracks in pavement surface have been identified. At each cracked pavement section, the effective thickness becomes less than the full-layer thickness. The cracked pavement could fail from one of the following two mechanisms under repeated actions of aircraft loadings: the crack continues to propagate top-down (6, 7 ), or the bottom strain becomes excessive and a bottom-up crack forms and propagates upward (8,9).The crack-related information needed for structural analysis, such as crack dimensions of width, length, and location, is typically found in condition survey records. Depth is the most difficult one to mea-To ensure safe runway operations and make the best use of maintenance funds, cracks in runway pavements should be repaired according to severity and maintenance needs. In traditional pavement maintenance management, priority of crack repair is determined by crack width, length, density, extent, and sometimes location. However, this basis for prioritization is not entirely satisfactory because it does not consider aircraft ...

Effective Non-invasive Runway Monitoring System Development Using Dual Sensor Devices

“…Structural integrity is the other issue at the airports that also lead to problems including accidents because any flaw on the taxiway or runway impacts the aircraft's taxing, landing (or take-off) [14]. An interesting work used robot mounted Ground Penetrating Radar and camera to detect cracks on the runway [7].…”