From the material behaviour to the thermo-mechanical long-term response of asphalt pavements and the alteration of surface drainage due to rutting: a sensitivity study

ABSTRACT

In this contribution, a simulation chain for the thermo-mechanical and hydromechanical analysis (surface drainage) of a pavement structure during its whole service life is applied to a typical asphalt pavement (Bk100) used for motorways in Germany. Transient load signals for each tyre position of a truck-trailer combination (vehicle) are generated from a multibody analysis of the vehicle driving on a motorway with rough pavement surface. Material model parameters are derived from experimental identification tests of asphalt materials. The model parameters are used together with a continuum-mechanical description of the asphalt material representing the thermo-mechanical material behaviour at the material scale. The material response of the pavement layers is integrated on the structural scale by using the finite element method (FEM) in combination with an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulation and equivalent tyre loads of a representative, finite element (FE) discretised truck tyre rolling on an FE discretised pavement section. Different scenarios of rut formation are computed by varying different influence factors (climate temperature, vertical tyre force, type of asphalt material of the surface layers etc.). During the subsequent hydromechanical analysis of the pavement, the simulated deformed geometry of the pavement surface is used to numerically compute surface drainage characteristics.

KEYWORDS:

• Dynamic tyre force
• dynamic load coefficient
• steady state rolling
• tyre-pavement interaction
• surface drainage

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Kalidhasan Rajendran and Qian Xu for the data assessment and preparation of parts of the raw data.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grants KA 1163/30, RE 1620/4, WE 1642/11, LE 3649/2 and EC 412/1 within the DFG Research Unit FOR 2089 is gratefully acknowledged.