Analysis of Interlocking Pavement Road (Case Study: COMSIT Road in University Of Ilorin)

This research project involves the analysis of the interlocking pavement along COMSIT Road, University of Ilorin, using a FEA program (MIDAS) for the modeling and analysis of the pavement and the Mechanistic-Empirical method as the analytical tool for result comparison. The methodology involved the use of 1.2m by 0.6m area of the road pavement using a Hyper-4 Node181 shell element in GTS NX. The top layer of the pavement have a Poisson’s ratio of 0.4 with a young modulus of 65MPa, the base have a Poisson’s ratio of 0.35 with a young modulus of 3.6MPa and the sub-grade have a Poisson’s ratio of 0.35 with a young modulus of 2MPa. The vehicular load was modeled using a pressure of 520kPa on the pavement. The results showed that the maximum stress and strain in the interlocking pavement are 416kPa and 0.0572 using manual calculation while the stress and strain in the pavement using MIDAS are 476kPa and 0.052. Base on the manual analysis, the damage factor for the interlocking pavement is 0.02.From GTS NX, that the maximum stress occurs at the center of top-most layer of the pavement. The maximum displacement is also located at the point of maximum stress while the maximum strain is at the center of the last layer of the pavement. The stress in the pavement reduces from 476kPa at the center of the pavement to 1.4kPa at the edge of the pavement