Pavement Mechanics: Lecture Notes

Some level of mechanistic logic resides at the heart of all pavement design and analysis approaches. For the most part, however, the profession involves considerable simplifications and dominant empirical components, typically founded on past local experience and engineering judgment. These subjective and weakly-based scientific tools are a necessity: they enable the tackling of practical real-life challenges and complexities of this engineering field.
Over the many years I have been engaged in teaching pavement-related topics to engineers and students (across different continents), I always found it easier and more satisfying to cover the mechanistic aspects. At the same time, it felt like the listeners were more engaged and intellectually challenged (in a good way); it also seemed that the material was ultimately more beneficial to their professional development. Interestingly, after deepening the pavement mechanics treatment, the need for simplification and subjective judgment became clearer and more acceptable.
Empirical arguments and local experience are non-uniform across countries, provisional by nature, and with limited capacity to address non-standard questions. On the other hand, pure mechanistic principles are universal, long-lasting, and applicable to a myriad of situations. They allow for proper interpretation of phenomena by providing tools to observe and form correct opinions, tools to best solve a problem without the benefit of specific past experience, and means of representing aspects of reality that are hard to measure. Moreover, mechanistic principles support design activities by providing rational guidance to alternative assessment and selection, capacity to evaluate future scenarios and reliably forecast potential outcomes, and help with anticipating (and compensating for) potential problems.
Consequently, the decision to compile my personal teaching notes into a single manuscript was accompanied by an obvious resolution – to retain and focus only on purely mechanistic topics. The outcome is this book, which is intended for both practicing engineers and civil engineering students. It serves as my humble attempt to introduce the basic mechanistic principles pertinent to the design and analysis of pavement systems.