Credits: Photo: David Wilson/CC BY 2.0
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Pavement deterioration takes many forms. It can manifest in almost imperceptible flaws, like surface roughness, to much more evident distresses, such as web-like alligator cracks. While the causes of these distresses are numerous, one cause, in particular, can impose an intractable burden: the weight of a vehicle.
In a prize-winning paper, Fengdi Guo, a PhD candidate at the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, helps clarify the layered relationship between traffic weight and pavement deterioration. The machine learning models he proposes have found that traffic weight induces specific kinds of damage in asphalt pavements, accelerating their deterioration rates. Concrete pavements, however, proved insensitive to traffic weight.