Heavy Truck Wheel Load Distributions on the Highway

Lateral load balance may be important in some rollover incidents and may provide a measure that could relate to the pavement damage from unbalanced loading.

Individual wheel loading was measured on 92 heavy trucks operating in western Oregon during 1995. This paper presents the analysis of those results in the form of distributions for various categories of wheel loads and for several unbalance measures.

Unbalance was found to have approximately normal statistical distribution with the center of gravity off-set up to 4 inches from the vehicle center. For axle sets the center of gravity off-set was up to 7.5 inches.