<b>Mechanical behavior of flexible pavements undergoing thermal gradients</b> - doi: 10.4025/actascitechnol.v33i3.10848

Abstract

The proper structural understanding of a pavement should consider, according to the pavement mechanics, the aspects related to the traffic load, the environment and material properties. When asphaltic materials are used, the stress/strain relationships and the dependencies of load-time and temperature are key parameters for understanding flexible pavement performance. In this study, we employed the finite elements method to calculate stress/strain in flexible pavements structures considering temperature variation. The input data includes material stiffness, which is function of temperature and changes with position and time. The pavement temperature is obtained through the heat transfer differential equation, applying the Laplace transform and its numerical inversion. The finite elements grid was generated by the software ANSYS^® and imported by the software MATLAB^®. In order to determine the stiffness of the first layer (asphalt concrete) we used the average of four nodes, depending on the each node temperature. The result evidences the importance of thermal gradients for the pavement analysis, both for the fatigue cracking and the accumulation of plastic deformations. The use of unique modulus for asphalt concrete layer generates results far from reality.