Determination of asphalt mixture's viscoelastic constitutive parameters for pavement response analysis using dynamic modulus transformation

Asphalt mixture is a kind of typical viscoelastic material, whose viscoelastic property is much affected by test temperature and loading rate. This feature makes it difficult to accurately determine the mixture's viscoelastic constitutive parameters, which is crucial for pavement mechanical analysis, and results in a large discrepancy between the calculated results and in situ measured data if parameters are not properly determined. Considering the background discussed above, this paper develops a theoretical method to determine asphalt mixture's Burgers model parameters through transforming dynamic modulus, which bases the extreme value characteristics of asphalt mixture's dynamic modulus and the theory of linear viscoelastic mechanics. Next, this paper conducts a series of laboratory experiments, analytical derivation and numerical modeling to verify this developed method's efficiency and accuracy, and obtains a satisfying result. In the latter part of this paper, a viscoelastic numerical modeling for Cagliari Elmas airport asphalt pavement's mechanical response is conducted, which just utilizes this developed method to determine a mixture's viscoelastic constitutive parameters and a comparison of pavement response among modeling results, in situ measured data and Flexpave modeling results verify this method again.

Automated summary

The paper develops a theoretical method to determine the Burgers model parameters of asphalt mixture by transforming dynamic modulus, which is verified through laboratory experiments, analytical derivation, and numerical modeling. Furthermore, a viscoelastic numerical modeling for Cagliari Elmas airport asphalt pavement's mechanical response is conducted using this method, and the comparison of results validates the efficiency and accuracy of the developed method.