Design of Pavements airside at Vienna International Airport – Introduction of a new Austrian design approach

Abstract

As Vienna International Airport has intention to become a new center for mid-distance flights towards Eastern Europe a new parallel runway should be built in the next couple of years to handle the increase in the number of flights related to this expansion. In this work, the design of rigid and semi-rigid pavements, including runways and aprons, is optimized resulting in recommended multi-layer constructions with a calculated technical life span of 30 years. A new Austrian design process for pavements airside is developed using equivalent damage factors for each airplane of an aircraft mix representative for Vienna International Airport – accounting for the ratio between the damage induced by one start of a standardized aircraft (based on an Airbus A380 with a virtual maximum take-off weight of 850 t and an ACN-number of 100) and one start of an individual aircraft – to determine the number of departures the pavement has to withstand within the technical life span, which is compared to the number of departures the pavement actually resists. This approach allows to evaluate not only the damage caused by individual airplanes of the actual aircraft mix but also the deterioration of aircrafts developed in the future and its effect on the technical life span of the multi-layer pavement. Using detailed finite element modeling of the dowels and modeling the interfaces between the concrete slabs as virtual linear springs, the optimum dowel spacings in longitudinal and transverse joints were determined. The results of this design process are in good agreement with the specification according to guidelines of the Federal Aviation Administration.