Concrete block pavements in urban and local roads: Analysis of stress-strain condition and proposal for a catalogue

Although the construction of block pavements has grown fast in the last decades, there is still a need for simple tools that could be applied to design them. This paper analyzed and verified concrete block pavements for urban and local roads composed of rectangular concrete pavers with plane side surfaces (no interlocking effect). The examined blocks were laid on a bedding sand layer, a cement treated base layer and a granular unbound foundation layer. The commercial finite element (FE) software ANSYS® was used to calculate the response of the pavement when subjected to different loading, construction configurations. Three wheel positions, five blocks patterns, three bedding sand thicknesses and joints gaps have been considered to evaluate stress-strain condition on pavement materials. Fatigue and rutting verification was performed respectively for bound and unbound pavement materials using analytical curves available in the literature. At the end of this study, a proposal for a catalogue is presented. It has nine pavement sets, because it takes into account three values of subgrade capacity (30, 90, and 150 MPa of resilient modulus) and three levels of traffic (400,000, 1,500,000, and 4,000,000 passages of commercial vehicles during the service life). The obtained results provide an inexpensive procedure for the preliminary design of concrete block pavements. Keywords: Block pavement, Finite element model, Concrete pavers, Local roads, Urban roads