Konferens: Ninth International Conference on the Bearing Capacity of Roads, Railways and Airfields, 2013, Trondheim

One of the main distresses that Mechanistic — Empirical (M-E) design methods attempt to control is permanent deformation (rutting). The objective of this paper is to evaluate an M-E permanent deformation model for an asphalt layers using test results from accelerated pavement testing. Two series of Heavy Vehicle Simulator (HVS) test structures were used. The permanent deformation, wheel loading, pavement temperature, and other material properties were continuously controlled during the HVS testing. The performance measurements were made at 10, 20 and 30°C pavement temperatures. Asphalt concrete layers were considered as linear elastic and their stiffness was modified according to the loading temperature where as stress dependent behaviour of unbound materials was considered when computing input parameters (stress and strains) for the M-E permanent deformation model. The traffic wandering was also accounted in modelling the traffic assuming normal wander distribution and a time hardening approach was applied to accumulate the permanent deformation contributions from different stress levels. The measured and predicted permanent deformations are in general in good agreements for 10 and 20°C temperatures however for a temperature of 30°C, the M-E model over-predicted the permanent deformations behaviour thus a better characterization of material properties and more validation is needed.