Road tanker pavement damage potentials

Dynamic loads derived from vehicle vibration accelerate pavement damage. While the primary cause for vehicle vibration is its dynamic response to pavement perturbations, there are another sources for vehicle vibration. In particular, the motion of the cargo on partially filled road tankers represents another causality for vehicle vibration that further affects the road damage potentials of such vehicles, which has not been addressed in the literature. In this paper, a simplified roll plane model is considered to analyse the road damage potentials of cargo sloshing when a road tanker travels along a winding road. Two inverted pendulums and one simple pendulum simulate the chassis-axle-cargo response to lateral perturbations. While the upper and lower pendulums simulate the roll responses of the chassis and axle, respectively, the simple pendulum, attached to the upper inverted pendulum, simulates the sloshing cargo. A validated formulation for the natural sloshing frequency is utilized to obtain the equivalent simple pendulum lengths for the two tank shapes and several fill levels considered. Results reveal that the effect of cargo sloshing can represent an increased road damage on the order of 20 percent as a function of fill level, tank shape and performance measure considered.