Analysis of LVE behaviour and fatigue damage evolution of asphalt pavements with different interface conditions in an accelerated full-scale experiment

ABSTRACT

For better optimization of pavement design and management, accelerated full-scale pavement tests (APT) represent very efficient tools to study pavement behaviour from initial to damaged condition. This paper presents an experimental study where three asphalt pavements with different interface conditions between the asphalt layers were tested in an APT experiment. Asphalt layer strains, FWD deflections, and surface cracking were monitored during the experiment. First, strain signals and pavement surface deflections measured at the beginning of the experiment, were used to characterize the viscoelastic properties of the asphalt layers. Then the measurements were used to analyze the fatigue behaviour of the experimental pavements, and the evolution of their level of damage to traffic. The analysis showed that in such asphalt pavements, asphalt strains, which varied significantly with the increase of load cycles, were not suitable for estimating an ‘average’ asphalt layer damage. In order to monitor the general pavement behaviour, a new damage ratio was introduced, based on FWD back-calculated moduli of the asphalt layers, that allowed to observe a stiffness increase of the asphalt layers at the beginning of the loading due to aging and post-compaction, and then fatigue damage evolution which had a very good correspondence with surface cracking.

KEYWORDS:

• Accelerated full-scale test
• asphalt pavement
• linear viscoelastic behaviour
• fatigue damage
• interface condition

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers and an anonymous associate editor. Part of the experimental data used in this study came from the full-scale test sponsored by the French National Research Agency (ANR-SolDuGri project ANR-14-CE22-0019).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the “Programme de Bourses France Excellence” from the French Embassy in Vietnam.