Modelling of Road Damage Potentials of Tandem C-Dolly

The paper deals with the pavement damage potential of long combination vehicles equipped with tandem C-dolly. Due to its double-hitch bar design, the tandem C-dolly enhances the lateral stability of the articulated vehicles; however, its single articulation could create significant levels of longitudinal load transfer between the coupled bodies and posing higher pavement damage. The pavement damage potentials of vehicles equipped with tandem C-dolly is compared with that of vehicles equipped with standard tandem A-dolly. For pavements with a roughness lower than 2 mm/m the effect of tandem design is only marginal. For pavements with roughness greater than 2 mm/m, results suggest an optimum speed (95 km/h) at which C-dolly is 1% less damaging than A-dolly. However, for the other two speeds evaluated (75 and 115 km/h), C-dolly is up to 12.1% less friendly than A-dolly. Such increases in road damaging potential are significant and an experimental study should be performed to validate results.