Fatigue damage characteristics of geocell-reinforced asphalt mixture: Fid-Bau Portal

Fatigue damage characteristics of geocell-reinforced asphalt mixture

Xianrong, Wang / Xiedong, Zhang / Yunsheng, Zhu / Xiaowei, Li

Highlights: • The application of 3D geocell can greatly improve the fatigue life of asphalt mixture. • This concise model with few parameters can well characterize the cumulative strain of asphalt mixture. • It provides a new idea for improving the mechanical properties of asphalt mixture.

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to develop a new method to improve the service life of asphalt pavement adding the geocell as reinforcement for asphalt mixture. A series of splitting fatigue tests were conducted and a viscoelastic damage model with clear physical meaning was used to evaluate the influence of geocell on the macroscopic performance of asphalt mixture. The test results show that the fatigue life of reinforced specimens is significantly improved compared to unreinforced specimens under the same loading conditions. Moreover, the improvement rate of fatigue life is not related to stress ratio, but related to loading temperature. When the loading temperatures are 5 °C, 15 °C and 25 °C, the improvement rates are approximately 60%, 110% and 230%, respectively. In addition, based on the viscoelastic damage model, it can be seen that the elastic modulus $E_{v}$ of the model increases with increasing stress ratio and decreases with increasing loading temperature, the model’s viscosity coefficients $η_{e}$ and $η_{v}$ both decrease with increasing stress ratio and loading temperature. The presence of geocell reduces the model’s elastic modulus $E_{v}$ and increases the viscosity coefficients $η_{e}$ and $η_{v}$ .