Evaluation of fatigue performance at different temperatures

• Author(s): Minhoto, Manuel J. C. ; Pais, Jorge C. ; Fontes, Liseane P. T. L.
• Date: 2009
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/14454
• Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
• Subject(s): Fatigue performance; Asphalt mixtures; Temperatures
• Document Type: Conference Object
• Language: English

Description

The fatigue performance of asphalt mixtures is used to predict pavement life to control the cracking in the asphalt layers. The design of an asphalt pavement is usually made for a specific temperature, what is intended to represent the pavement behaviour throughout a whole year. For damage analysis during a year, along which the pavement temperature constant-ly varies, it is necessary to calculate the fatigue performance of pavements at a wide range of temperatures. Thus, this paper presents the evaluation of the fatigue response of two asphalt mixtures, a conventional and an asphalt rubber mixture. Frequency sweep tests were also per-formed to evaluate the stiffness modulus. The fatigue test results showed that the fatigue life de-creases when the test temperature decreases up to a certain value. After that value, the fatigue life increases when the test temperature decreases. To explain this phenomenon, this paper presents the preliminary tests carried out to measure the temperature inside the testing speci-mens to verify possible discrepancies between the climatic chamber temperature and the speci-men temperature.