Mechanistic-Empirical Analysis of Platanares Road, Vásquez de Coronado County

Abstract

The county of Vázquez de Coronado in the province of San José, Costa Rica, is made up of five districts, Patalillo, San Isidro, San Rafael, Dulce Nombre de Jesús and Cascajal, where there is great economic activity in each of its districts. In several areas, the activities that are most dominant are farming and tourism, which are carried out mostly in the upper part of the districts of Dulce Nombre de Jesús and Cascajal, being in the latter where the street called Platanares is located. The street does not currently allow transit because of the damaged state it is in. However, said route would be an important connection between National Route 216 and National Route 307 allowing greater efficiency to movement of goods. That is why in this research the data obtained from materials, climate and traffic of the area is being processed and analyzed based on an empirical mechanistic pavement design methodology using a linear elastic multilayer software to determine the stresses, deflections and especially unit deformations required by transfer equations in the mechanistic models to calculate fatigue compliance by cracked area, longitudinal cracks, and total deformation and rutting. With the data obtained, a base design was made that was iterated twice, optimizing the design in cost as structural capacity, complying with a specific design for the area analyzed for the analysis time established according to the hierarchical level chosen based on the roads’ characteristics and demonstrating the efficiency of mechanistic empirical methods over current empirical methodologies.