Effects of Mix Factors on the Mechanistic-Empirical Flexible Pavement Design

摘要

This study investigates the sensitivity of the mechanistic-empirical flexible pavement designperformance parameters such as cracking, rutting, and smoothness to mix factors for 11 categories ofhot-mix asphalt (HMA) mixtures. For each category of HMA mixture, the variations in the pavementperformances for different effective binder content (Vbe), air void (Va), voids-in-mineral aggregates(VMA), voids-filled-with asphalt (VFA), and asphalt content (AC) are examined by the AASHTOWarePavement Mechanistic-Empirical Design, simply the AASHTOWare software analysis. Five types ofdistresses: international roughness index (IRI), total rutting, rutting in the HMA layer, bottom-upfatigue cracking, and top-down longitudinal fatigue cracking are considered in the analysis. Resultsshow that the prediction of distresses values after 20-year of service life using the AASHTOWaresoftware may differ by up to 170% for different specimens of a certain mix design. All distresses,except rutting, increase in Va, VMA, and VFA. Rutting in HMA increases with an increase in VMAand VFA, and is insensitive to Vbe, Va, and AC in the study range of these parameters.