USE OF SIMPLE NON-LINEAR REGRESSION IN THE STRUCTURAL ASSESMENT OF ASPHALT PAVEMENTS HIGHWAYS

Abstract

Road pavements are the main infrastructure for passenger and cargo transportation in Brazil. To ensure their useful life, the rolling comfort of vehicles and the operations and users safety, it is necessary that the pavements are properly evaluated with an appropriate frequency, considering the context of pavement management. In this sense, the structural assessment stands out for allowing knowledge of the load capacity of the infrastructure, although it still has impacts on traffic flow and high costs during field surveys, mainly due to the equipment and techniques involved. Inadequate structural conditions provide the appearance, among other distress in flexible pavements, of excessive rutting and deformations greater than those allowed by the infrastructure. In view of this context, this paper aims at carrying out an analysis of the parameters of rutting and characteristic deflection of national highway pavements, in order to obtain a satisfactory correlation model. Simple non-linear correlation between the parameters was used, because the linear correlation was not adequate. The results obtained indicate, through the coefficient of determination and other analyses, that the model developed is acceptable and can assist the manager in planning the field survey.