The Use Of Embedded Stress Cells For Monitoring Pavement Performance

This paper discusses factors that influence the performance of stress cells embedded in pavement test sections. Accelerated testing of two instrumented flexible pavement sections was carried out using a linear traffic simulator. Interesting data were obtained from stress cells embedded in the clayey subgrade. For both sections, the vertical stress inside this layer was shown to increase with axle load repetition. It also appeared to correlate well with the corresponding increase of surface rutting. The interpretation of these data required a previous investigation of stress cell performance using both laboratory and in situ calibration tests. Details of pavement testing and cell calibration procedures are also described in this paper.