Engineering >> Civil & Environmental EngineeringEffects of pounds per square inch on roadsby Amadis Rivera Pabon
Submitted : Spring 2018
According to Zach Patton in his article in Governing.com, “Too big for the road,” highway roads are designed to wear down after twenty years of service. The average car in America weighs 4000 pounds so I used a piece of chalk to outline the perimeter of the part of the tire that touches the road on a 2002 Subaru Forester which has a total gross weight of about 4000 pounds. Because the shape that resulted could be split into two parts (a big rectangle in the middle and two semi-circle resembling shapes at the ends) I was able to use a regular base times height to find the rectangular area and an equation (insert equation here) to find the area of the semi circles by taking the integral and plugging in its range. After this I divided the weight of the car by the area of four of these tires and found the pounds per square inch this car exerted on the road. This is the ideal pounds per square inch the 20 year road is designed to support. Now that I had the area of a tire that touches the floor I then divided the weight of the trucks by 18 times the area of the tire that touches the floor. This was the pound per square inch that made a road designed to last 20 years last 7. I then compared the two pounds per square inch and found the difference to see how much bigger it was that causes so much damage to the road. Related Links:
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