Contact based analysis of asphalt pavement with the effect of aggregate angularity

Relating the performance behavior of asphalt pavement with its design parameters may provide the insight information of how to control and improve the quality of asphalt pavement. The relation must be developed in a functional form so the effect of design parameters on the overall stress-strain response of asphalt pavement then can be quantified based on a single-variable perturbation. This article will show that using the contact based mechanism may provide the means to develop the stress-strain relations with the parameters being analytically dependent on the physical and geometric properties of asphalt and aggregates. Specifically, the effect of aggregate angularity is incorporated into the overall response of asphalt pavement by using the higher order analysis of the mean-stress theory and an interpolation technique. The results presented in this article show that higher degree of aggregate angularity gives rise of stiffer response of asphalt pavement, which is consistent with the phenomenon of a better interlocking interaction for coarse aggregates. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.