Temperature Effect on Deflection Prediction of Asphalt Pavement with Drainage Layer

Abstract

Climate change in the form of global warming has been a popular topic for decades. However, similar issues have never been associated with the performance of pavement and paving materials. As a viscoelastic material, asphalt concrete is sensitive to temperature, which affects its mechanical performance. Asphalt pavements built under different climatic regions may perform differently with the same structure and material. A typical Virginia pavement structure with a drainage layer has been used as an example in the present work to perform finite-element method (FEM) simulations. Strain responses were obtained under moving wheel loading. The dynamic moduli of the surface layer and drainage layer obtained from laboratory tests were employed in the simulations for better accuracy. To understand the temperature effect, several groups of subsurface temperature distributions measured from asphalt pavements in North Carolina and Canada were used in the simulations. The rutting depths of asphalt layers in a typical Virginia pavement have been predicted using a mechanistic-empirical pavement design guide (MEPDG) rut-depth transfer function from the strain responses obtained in the FEM simulations.