Prediction of pavement performance is important to pavement engineers. Pavement surface deterioration is a dynamic and complicated process. Moisture damage and fatigue are considered as two major causes of pavement deterioration. During a pavement’s service life, the presence of water can lead to loss of stiffness and strength of the asphalt pavement structure. Apart from that, the presence of water can accelerate the propagation and severity of already existing distress. High tensile strain at the bottom of an asphalt layer results fatigue cracking in a pavement. The goal of this research was to develop a series of computational models to predict pavement surface deterioration under the effects of moisture and traffic. The first task was to calculate the pavement surface water pressure under a moving tyre. The water is compressed underneath the tyres, generating a water pressure pulse. This pressure allows surface water to penetrate into the pavement structure. Then the asphalt pavement internal structure (voids distribution) was determined and the water pressure distribution inside the pavement structure was calculated for both fully saturated and partially saturated condition using the surface water pressure. The water pressure expands the voids inside the pavement. Consequently, stress and strain at the edge of the voids, due to frequent traffic passes can lead to failure of the pavement. A ravelling failure probability line was then predicted with the help of cavity expansion theory and asphalt crack propagation law. The case study for the performance of four different asphalt types (HRA, SMA, AC, DBM) using the failure probability calculation shows a good correspondence with their real performance which indicates that this process of predicting failure probability is generally acceptable.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:740699 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Liu, Yawen |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/48275/ |
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