Develop Methodologies/Protocols to Assess Cracking Potential of Asphalt Mixtures Using Accelerated Pavement Testing; Final rept

摘要

Methodologies were identified which involved the use of the accelerated pavement aging system (APAS) to induce age-hardening of the pavement in the accelerated pavement testing (APT) facility and achieve stiffness profiles consistent with those observed in field-aged pavements, followed by loading with and without wander using the heavy vehicle simulator (HVS). These approaches would allow us to evaluate several hypotheses associated with the development and accumulation of damage and its effect on top-down cracking, as well as hypotheses associated with the energy-based cracking criteria developed in earlier FDOT research efforts. Properties determined from FWD tests on the pavement sections and Superpave IDT tests performed on asphalt concrete cores obtained from the pavements at different aging levels have been used to predict stresses, strains, and energies due to applied wheel loads. Excellent correspondence has been observed between predicted and measured strains, strains measured using gates epoxied to the surface of the pavement are excellent tools for evaluation of pavement load response, but are not good indicators of the development of damage.