In the past decade, numerous studies have shown that incorporating geogrid in the pavement could effectively improve the pavement performance. Pavement performance is usually measured in terms of individual pavement distress such as rutting, crack, etc. The major benefit of using geogrid in the flexible pavement is to improve its rutting performance as the result of the reinforcement function of geogrid. Mechanical-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (M-E PDG) developed under the National Corporative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) is a powerful tool to analysis and design of flexible pavement. In addition, one important feature of M-E PDG is its capability to provide the pavement performance prediction throughout its design life. However, at this point, M-E PDG is not able to consider the effect of incorporating geogrid in the flexible pavement.
In this study, a design procedure was proposed to obtain an equivalent geogrid pavement structure, which satisfies M-E PDG design input requirements. In this procedure, a 2-D finite element method was used to simulate geogrid reinforced and non-reinforced pavement structures. The iteration process based on stress-strain analysis of finite element model was then used to obtain an equivalent structure inputs for M-E PDG. The geogrid reinforced rutting performance can then be predicted by analyzing the equivalent geogrid structure using M-E PDG software. A significant life improvement of pavement with geogrid was observed compared to pavement without geogrid

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