Effect of Uniform Vertical and Longitudinal Dowel Misalignment in Jointed Plain Concrete Pavement

Abstract

With the development in construction technology, dowel bars insertion in the joint plain concrete pavement (JPCP) is practiced using dowel bar inserters (DBI). Although DBI, can reduce the probability of the single dowel bar misalignment, wrong construction practices, gap graded concrete mixtures, inappropriate calibration of DBI may result in the complete assembly of dowel bars being misaligned. Most previous studies investigated the effect of single dowel misalignment, which may not describe the stress-state when entire dowel bars assembly is misaligned. Further, experimental investigations may be expensive to investigate the effect of dowel bars misalignment. In this direction, to understand the impact of uniform misalignment of dowel bars assembly, a 3D finite element model was developed considering vertical and longitudinal translation type of misalignments. The model results indicated that the vertical translation misalignment results in excessive tensile stresses in the concrete at the joint. This may lead to tensile fatigue failure resulting in dowel looseness. Further, the longitudinal translation resulted in higher compressive stresses, which may result in the crushing of the concrete due to repeated application of wheel loads. Both the cases of misalignment resulted in lower load transfer efficiency than no-misalignment cases. The study found that critical stresses in the concrete at the joint are a function of the type of dowel misalignment. � 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Chinese Society of Pavement Engineering.