Development of Asphalt Mixtures for Sustainable Pavements

Rut Resistant Asphalt Pavements

The three major distress conditions affecting the performance of asphalt pavements are permanent deformation or rutting, fatigue or load associated cracking, and low temperature or thermal cracking. In an earlier technical topics article (Fall, 1998), we examined the causes of fatigue cracking and the importance of good compaction during construction to help minimize this type of distress. In t...

Dynamic Hydraulic Conductivity (Permeability) of Asphalt Pavements

External pressures applied to a saturated pavement pore structure are often dynamic due to the repeated tire loading. Therefore, a dynamic permeability constant is more realistic representation of the response of a pavement pore structure than the Darcy’s permeability. To investigate the unsteady (dynamic) fluid flow in asphalt pavements, a 3D fluid flow model was developed using the lattice Bo...

Performance Evaluation of Dynamic Modulus Predictive Models for Asphalt Mixtures

Dynamic modulus characterizes the viscoelastic behavior of asphalt materials and is the most important input parameter for design and rehabilitation of flexible pavements using Mechanistic–Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG). Laboratory determination of dynamic modulus is very expensive and time consuming. To overcome this challenge, several predictive models were developed to determine dyn...

Capturing Solar Energy from Asphalt Pavements

The concept of extracting heat energy from asphalt pavements has been investigated in this study. The scope of work consisted of finite element modeling and testing with small and large scale asphalt pavement samples. Water flowing through copper tubes inserted within asphalt pavements samples were used as heat exchangers in the experiments. The rise in temperature of water as a result of flow ...

Concrete Overlays as a Rehabilitation Option for Distressed Asphalt Pavements