Quantifying Traffic- and Temperature-Induced Fatigue Damages of Asphalt Pavement

Abstract

Bottom-up fatigue cracking (i.e., alligator cracking) in MechanisticEmpirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) is predicted based on accumulated damage caused by repeated traffic loading only. Since the number of thermal expansion and contraction is small compared to the number of traffic loads, MEPDG does not consider damage due to thermal expansion and contraction in fatigue cracking calculation of an asphalt pavement. However, thermal damage may be significant and possibly causes premature failure of asphalt pavement especially in zones where daynight and yearly temperature variations are relatively large. This study measures thermal fatigue damage at the bottom of an asphalt concrete and hence, the fatigue life of asphalt concrete using data from an instrumentation pavement section on Interstate 40 (I-40) in New Mexico. As a first step, fatigue models are developed for both vehicle and thermal loads based on laboratory beam fatigue test results. In the second step, using the field-measured strain and modulus values, fatigue damages due to vehicle load and temperature fluctuations are determined. Results show that damages due to traffic load and daily and yearly temperature fluctuations are 62, 5, and 33 % of the total fatigue damage, respectively, in 1-year analysis based on a specific site in New Mexico. Therefore, this study suggests that pavement design should consider fatigue damage due to temperature load in addition to damage due to repeated traffic loading.

Effect of climate on asphalt pavement performance using two mechanistic-empirical methods

“…Recent studies by (Nasimifar et al, 2011), (Rychen, 2013), (Wei et al, 2013), (Wistuba and Walther, 2013), (Bilodeau et al, 2013), (A. Elshaeb et al, 2014), (Saha et al, 2014) (Islam and Tarefder, 2015), (Yang et al, 2015(Yang et al, , 2016(Yang et al, , 2017, (Hasan et al, 2016), (Hasan and Tarefder, 2017), (Enríquez-de-Salamanca, 2017) (Pereira and Pais, 2017), and (Gudipudi et al, 2017) show that climate conditions have a direct impact on road pavement durability and performance in terms of cracking and permanent deformation.…”

New Mechanistic Procedure to Predict the Critical Cracking Temperature of Asphalt Concrete from Bending Beam Rheometer and Indirect Tension Test Data

“…This type of crack mostly occurs in colder regions where the temperature drops significantly below the freezing point. It can be initiated by a single extreme low-temperature event or by thermal fatigue cycles (1,2). As the temperature decreases, the pavement layer tries to shrink its volume because of the thermal contraction of the material.…”