Graded viscoelastic approach for modeling asphalt concrete pavements

Asphalt concrete pavements exhibit severely graded properties through their thickness due to oxidative aging effects, which are most pronounced at the surface of the pavement and decrease rapidly with depth from the surface. Most of the literature to date has focused on use of layered-elastic models for the consideration of age stiffening. In the current work, a graded viscoelastic model has been implemented within a numerical framework for the simulation of asphalt pavement responses under thermal and mechanical loading. The graded viscoelastic work is extension of the previous work by Paulino and Jin [1], Mukherjee and Paulino [2], and Buttlar et al. [3]. A functionally graded generalized Maxwell model has been used in the development of a constitutive model for asphalt concrete considering aging and temperature gradients. The aging gradient data from laboratory test results reported by Apeagyei [4] is used for obtaining material properties for the graded viscoelastic model. Finite element implementation of the constitutive model incorporates the generalized iso-parametric formulation (GIF) proposed by Kim and Paulino [5], which leads to the graded viscoelastic elements used in this work.