During asphalt mixture compaction, loads in the material are mainly transferred through contact between the stones and the interaction between the stones and the binder. The behaviour of such materials is suitable to model using the Discrete Element Method (DEM). In this study, a new DEM modelling approach has been developed for studying the asphalt compaction process, incorporating contact and damage laws based on granular mechanics. In the simulations, aggregate fracture is handled by a recently developed method of incorporating particle fracture in DEM, based on previously performed fracture experiments on granite specimens. The binder phase is modelled by adding a viscoelastic film around each DEM particle. This surface layer has a thickness that obtains the correct volume of the binder phase and has mechanical properties representative for the binder at different temperatures. The ability of the model to capture the influence of mixture parameters on the compactability and the eventual stone damage during compaction is examined for the cases of compaction flow test and gyratory compaction. Explicitly, the influence of different aggregate gradations, mixture temperatures and binder properties are studied. The results show that the proposed DEM approach is able to capture qualitatively and quantitatively responses in both cases and also provide predictions of aggregate damage. One large benefit with the developed modelling approach is that the influence of different asphalt mixture parameters could be studied without re-calibration of model parameters. Furthermore, based on comparative DEM simulations, it is shown that the proposed approach provides more realistic force distribution networks in the material.

Permanent deformation of unbound granular materials plays an essential role in the long-term performance of a pavement structure. Stability of unbound granular materials is defined by the particle-to-particle contact of the system, the particle size distribution and the packing arrangement. This paper presents a gradation model based on packing theory to evaluate permanent deformation of unbound granular materials. The framework was evaluated by using 10 unbound granular materials from different countries. The disruption potential, which determines the ability of secondary structure (SS) to disrupt the primary structure (PS), is introduced. This study also identified the amount of PS and SS that may eventually be used as a design parameter for permanent deformation of unbound road layers. The evaluation of the model regarding permanent deformation behaviour of granular materials is found to compare favourably with experimental results.

In the present paper a robust and general computational framework that captures the dynamic response of flexible pavements to a moving vehicle is presented. A finite element method is relied upon in order to establish the response function for a linear viscoelastic pavement structure with dynamic effects taken into account. In order to characterise the dynamic loads induced on the pavement by moving traffic, a quarter car model combined with measured road profiles is used. Once both the traffic loads and pavement response functions are known, the stresses and strains induced in the pavement can be obtained in the frequency–wavenumber domain through the convolution procedure. The computational procedure developed is applied in the present study to evaluate the effect of the pavement surface roughness on the pavement structure response to truck traffic loading. Stress field parameters governing fracture initiation in asphalt layers are reported for two measured road roughness profiles. It is shown that the dynamic effects at vehicle–road interaction may have a profound influence on the stresses induced in flexible pavements; therefore, these effects need to be taken into account for the accurate estimation of the road resistance to cracking.

Over the past several decades, California bearing ratio (CBR) value has been used in many countries for empirical pavement designs and still many countries are using it for unbound granular materials strength measurement and as input to their pavement design chart. Furthermore, CBR value of unbound granular material is frequently correlated with its fundamental mechanical properties such as resilient modulus, which in turn is often used as an input to a mechanistic pavement design procedure. In the present study, the effect the aggregate packing has on the CBR values of unbound materials is investigated. A packing theory-based framework that allows to identify the load-carrying part of the aggregate skeleton is presented. Aggregate packing parameters controlling the CBR performance of the unbound materials are introduced and evaluated with the experimentally measured CBR values of 20 unbound granular materials found in the literature. It is shown that the CBR values of granular materials are to a great extent controlled by the packing characteristics of their load-carrying skeleton.