Análise de resultados do software FAARFIELD na vida útil de pavimentos aeroportuários

Abstract

The FAARFIELD, an airport pavement project software developed by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), is the tool used in Brazil for design and analysis of airport pavements. Pavement analyzes using FAARFIELD resulted in pavement lives longer than a million years and with high variability, on the order of hundreds of thousands of years to small changes in base and subbase layer thicknesses. This high variability can lead decision makers to adopt inefficient solutions, what creates, in addition to the fact that FAARFIELD is a tool widely used in airport pavement analysis, the need to understand the variability of these data. Thus, this research has as its main objective to study the sensitivity of the data that FAARFIELD software generates when used in the analysis of airport pavement life. For this, series of pavement useful life were generated with variations in traffic volume and base and subbase layer thicknesses. To the traffic volume variation were used four mixes of four airports: Cariri Regional Airport, Fortaleza International Airport, São Paulo International Airport and Atlanta International Airport. For the studied thicknesses, the pavement life initially increased for reductions in the structure thickness, and FAARFIELD calculated repeated pavement life values to pavements with same total thickness, regardless of the combination among base and subbase layer thicknesses. For the performed analyzes, the sensitivity for the change in the base layer thickness was initially small, increasing sharply from dimensions less than 215 mm and remaining high for any thickness less than this value. As the traffic volume was increased, smaller was the data variation for changes in base layer thickness (lower sample variance of the generated data) and smaller was the sensitivity values. The same analyzes performed to the base layer were repeated for the subbase layer, however they did not present results that allowed the identification of influence patterns of the changes in subbase layer to pavement life results. It leads to the conclusions that the pavement life calculated by FAARFIELD software is sensitive to changes in base layer, being the data variability smaller to the higher the traffic volume is. For the subbase layer influence the used data amount was not enough to conclude how the pavement life behaves for changes in this layer. However, the results showed that there is influence of the changes in the subbase layer to the sensitive of pavement life.