Wear Degradation Law of Airport Pavements Under the Coupled Effects of Freeze–Thaw Cycles, Temperature Gradients, and Aircraft Taxiing Loads

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Authors: Mingzhi Sun, Xing Gong, Hao Xu, Chuanyu Shao, Zhenyu Zhao
Cited by: 1
References: 28

Abstract

To clarify the wear degradation of airport cement concrete pavements under combined environmental and traffic actions, this study established an environment-tire-pavement multi-physics finite element model incorporating surface texture, freeze–thaw deterioration, temperature gradients, and aircraft lift during taxiing. Indoor rapid freeze–thaw tests, accelerated wear tests, and 3D texture scanning were further conducted to calibrate and validate the model. The results show that temperature gradients significantly amplify pavement wear. At 180 km/h and 1.2 million wear cycles, increasing the temperature gradient from 0 to 60 °C/m increased wear depth and wear mass by about 40% and 96%, respectively. Taxiing speed was negatively correlated with wear, mainly because higher speed reduced tire-pavement contact duration and effective vertical load. Freeze–thaw deterioration was the dominant factor affecting wear, and the coupled freeze–thaw–temperature–load condition produced the most severe damage. The experimental and simulation results agreed well, with R2 values above 0.98. Based on the combined experimental-simulation dataset, an interpretable CNN-BiLSTM model was developed for wear-depth prediction, achieving RMSE values of 0.019 and 0.035 for the training and test sets, respectively. SHAP analysis further confirmed that freeze–thaw cycles contributed most to wear prediction. This study can provide a quantitative basis for the wear resistance evaluation, life prediction, and maintenance decision-making of airport pavements.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Smart Materials for Construction Asphalt Pavement Performance Evaluation Concrete and Cement Materials Research

Publication details

Journal / source
Materials
Publisher
MDPI AG
Volume
19
Issue
7
Pages
1368–1368
Publication date
30 March 2026
Language
EN