Performance of protective concrete runway pavement under aircraft impact loading
Saima Ali, Sabrina Fawzia, David Thambiratnam, Xuemei Liu, Alex Remennikov
Abstract
Necessity of protective runway pavement is important to reduce the maintenance cost and avoid disruption. The study started with conducting few impact drop weight tests on small specimens of normal concrete runway pavement and a proposed fibre reinforced concrete runway pavement. The performance of the proposed fibre reinforced runway pavement specimen was proved much better than the normal concrete runway pavement specimen. A three-dimensional finite element model of this fibre reinforced runway pavement specimen was then validated using ABAQUS software. Furthermore, the performance of this improved fibre reinforced concrete runway pavement was studied in large scale under the single and multiple impact of Airbus 380. A rigorous parametric study was also carried out to explore the effects of type of aircraft, impact duration, compressive strength, tensile strength and boundary condition of runway fibre reinforced concrete pavement in changing the surface deflection.