Caracterización y análisis de la estadística Chilena para el diseño de pavimentos empírico-mecanicista

Weather is one of the main variables influencing in pavement performance. The parameters of bituminous materials change with temperature, the strength of unbounded materials varies with humidity and the thermal gradients affect the binding conditions of concrete slabs. However, traditional empiric design methods consider these climate variables in a very simplistic way. In the last decades researchers have advanced towards a more mechanistic- empirical design, considering the weather and the properties of the materials with more detail and precision. The Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide AASHTO 2008 (MEPDG), adds the weather as a main input, requiring information on temperature, relative humidity, wind velocity, solar exposure and precipitations. Chile has been lately working on the MEPDG implementation through the Innova- Corfo 11BPC-10220 project. One of the tasks of the project was the characterization, validation and analysis of 17 climate stations and its relationship with the damages. This study summarizes the development of the characterization and analysis of climate variables, presents the distribution and comparison of the Chilean environmental factors and identifies the main variables for each damage type in new pavements. Results show that solar exposition and the daily temperature variation are the most important climate variables for rigid pavements, while, for flexible pavements, the air temperature affects the most, followed by precipitations.