Cracking Analysis of Asphalt Mixture Using Semi-circle Bending Method

The stiffness, fracture toughness, fracture energy and tensile strength are commonly used as the primary parameters to evaluate the properties of asphalt mixture cracking and used as inputs in numerical simulation. In this paper a semi-circle bending (SCB) test was conducted to investigate the influence of temperature levels, binder types and loading speeds on those parameters. Moreover, the extended finite element method (XFEM) was utilized to simulate SCB test. And stiffness, tensile strength and fracture energy obtained from SCB test were used as the inputs in XFEM models. The tests were performed at different temperature levels of 5 celcius, -5 celcius and -20 celcius, different loading speeds of 0.0005 mm/s and 0.005 mm/s, respectively. The styrene-butadiene-styrene (SBS)-modified asphalt, rubber-plastic-modified asphalt and Qilu No.70 road petroleum asphalt were used as the binders of asphalt mixtures. From load versus loading displacement curves which were obtained from SCB test, stiffness, fracture toughness, fracture energy and tensile strength were calculated. The influences of temperature levels, binder types and loading speed on the parameters were analysed. In addition, extended finite element method (XFEM), which is particularly well suited to model discontinuous features, is used to analyse the effects of initial notch width and notch shape on SCB test.

Automated summary

In this paper, the influence of temperature levels, binder types and loading speeds on the parameters of asphalt mixture cracking was investigated through SCB tests, with stiffness, tensile strength and fracture energy used as inputs in XFEM models. The results showed the effects of temperature, binder type and loading speed on these parameters, and XFEM was used to analyze the effects of initial notch width and shape on SCB tests.