Viscoelastic analysis of surface responses in flexible pavements under different loading conditions

Abstract

Due to time-temperature dependent behavior of asphalt concrete (AC), viscoelastic analysis is necessary for understanding the mechanism of top-down cracking (TDC). In this study, a new approach for determining the viscoelastic surface responses of multi-layered asphalt pavements was developed to solve the complicated oscillating behavior and slow convergence of the integrand of Laplace-transformed step-response function at pavement surface. By employing the Lucas algorithm, the irregular oscillations were reduced to regular oscillations by separating the integrand into high- and low-frequency components. The results calculated from the proposed approach were widely verified against finite element (FE) results. According to horizontal strains calculated at pavement surface, mechanism of TDC initiation was investigated under stationary and moving loads. The results indicated that high temperature and low vehicle speed were among the predominant factors contributing to TDC initiation. In addition, TDCs were more likely to initiate at a very close distance to the tire edge.

KEYWORDS:

• Viscoelastic analysis
• top-down cracking
• moving load
• horizontal strain
• asphalt pavement

Acknowledgments

This research was sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51678114), Urumqi Transportation Research Project (JSKJ201806), Inner Mongolia Transportation Research Project (NJ-2014-21, NJ-2015-36), and Shanxi Transportation Research Project (2015-1-22). The authors gratefully acknowledge their financial support.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Urumqi Transportation Research Project [grant number: JSKJ201806]; Inner Mongolia Transportation Research Project [grant number: NJ-2014-21, NJ-2015-36]; Shanxi Transportation Research Project [grant number: 2015-1-22]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number: 51678114].