Design and Engineering Challenges in the Development of the FAA’s Full Scale Accelerated Pavement Test Facility NAPMRC

Accelerated Pavement Test Facilities are not a common type of facility for Architecture and Engineering (A/E) firms to have experience with. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) commissioned the design of their APT Facility, the National Airport Pavement and Materials Research Center (NAPMRC) in 2012. Personnel from the FAA’s National Airport Pavement Test Facility near Atlantic City, NJ USA worked with an A/E firm to develop a facility to utilize the FAA’s Heavy Vehicle Simulator for Airfields (HVS-A). The HVS-A commissioned by the FAA and built by Dynatest Corporation is the largest HVS ever constructed by Dynatest. Challenges were encountered in working with designers to build pavements “designed to fail” and to gather information from those pavements as they fail. This included educating the designers to the build, test, fail and repeat concept of accelerated pavement testing. The NAPMRC encompasses both indoor and outdoor test pavements. Electric power required to run the HVS-A needed to be provided throughout the facility to make full use of the six lanes of test pavement being constructed. Data collection and communications networks that could deliver pavement sensor information were designed with flexibility to handle a variety of sensor for the original and future test pavement builds.