Researchers usually treated asphalt mixtures as liner elastic materials and ignored the viscoelastic property of the mixtures in previous researches, which resulted in additional calculating errors. This paper presents a methodology for analyzing the viscoelastic behavior of asphalt concrete and modeling the pavement to analyze the response so as to obtain the fracture parameters of reflective cracking. This paper described the viscoelastic behavior of asphalt concrete through mechanistic models fitted to creeping data which obtained in creep test. Based on the viscoelastic fracture mechanistic theory and plane-strain finite element method, a Finite ElementModeling approach was used to simulate the response of the fracture parameters of reflective cracking under different conditions such as thermal loading, dynamic traffic loading and damping factor of the structure. The findings presented in this study indicate that when pavement surface coolingmore drastically, the stress intensity factor becomes bigger and the relaxation curve turns more gently. Reference temperature can hardly influencethe maximum stress intensity factor, but the stress intensity factor relaxes faster as reference temperature increases. While vehicle speed increases, the maximum values of fracture parameters decrease. The structure temperature has no significant influence on the maximum values of fracture parameters and the moment at which the maximum values appear. The fracture parameter time-history curves moving backward and the maximum values of the fracture parameters decrease gradually while structure damping factor increases.
Abstract