Equivalent thermal resistance of the road surface

The design and construction of highways in the cryolithozone is associated with a number of difficulties, which are determined not only by geocryological and climatic operating conditions, but also by the complexity of the actual forecast of the thermal regime of road coverings and foundations. Many thermal calculations to substantiate technical solutions for the protection of highways in the cryolithozone from negative cryogenic phenomena are based on the determination and selection of a given thermal resistance of the structural layers of the pavement. The purpose of these studies was to assess the feasibility of using equivalent thermal resistance in modeling thermal processes and to determine the error in calculations that we make by replacing the layered pavement structure with an equivalent one.     Simple engineering dependences are obtained that allow us to determine the error in calculations when using equivalent thermal resistance. The calculation of the thermal resistance of the three-layer construction of the pavement is made. It is established that for a three-layer pavement structure, the error value in the calculation of thermal resistance is directly related to the degree of deviation of the values of the thermal conductivity coefficient of the materials of individual layers from each other. Moreover, the parameters of the inequality of thermal conductivity coefficients for individual structural layers when determining the minimum calculation error are functionally related to each other. The results of variant numerical calculations are presented in the form of 3D and 2D graphs, which allow us to visually assess the influence of the studied parameters on the relative error of calculating the thermal resistance of the pavement.