2014 - USA - Pavement Infrastructures Footprint: The Impact of Pavement Properties on Vehicle Fuel Consumption.

A novel mechanistic model based on an infinite beam on elastic foundation is developed to
quantify the impact of pavement structural and material properties on pavement deflection and consequently on vehicle fuel consumption. The model can also account for the effect of temperature and vehicle speed on fuel consumption. A simplified expression for evaluating the energy dissipation for practical purposes is proposed and used to investigate the impact of various pavement design systems on fuel consumption. GPS (General Pavement Studies) sections from the FHWA’s Long Term Pavement Performance program (FHWA 2011) are used for this study. These sections consist of asphalt concrete (AC), portland cement concrete (PCC) and composite pavements. The model quantifies the impact of temperature and vehicle speed on the fuel consumption and confirms that those impacts are negligible for PCC and significant for AC pavements due to their viscoelasticity.