Effects of Mix Factors on the Mechanistic-Empirical Flexible Pavement Design
Department of Engineering Technology, Colorado State University, Pueblo, CO 81001, USA
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Designs 2019, 3(3), 36; https://doi.org/10.3390/designs3030036
Received: 8 June 2019 / Revised: 4 July 2019 / Accepted: 6 July 2019 / Published: 10 July 2019
This study investigates the sensitivity of the mechanistic-empirical flexible pavement design performance parameters such as cracking, rutting, and smoothness to mix factors for 11 categories of hot-mix asphalt (HMA) mixtures. For each category of HMA mixture, the variations in the pavement performances for different effective binder content (Vbe), air void (Va), voids-in-mineral aggregates (VMA), voids-filled-with asphalt (VFA), and asphalt content (AC) are examined by the AASHTOWare Pavement Mechanistic-Empirical Design, simply the AASHTOWare software analysis. Five types of distresses: international roughness index (IRI), total rutting, rutting in the HMA layer, bottom-up fatigue cracking, and top-down longitudinal fatigue cracking are considered in the analysis. Results show that the prediction of distresses values after 20-year of service life using the AASHTOWare software may differ by up to 170% for different specimens of a certain mix design. All distresses, except rutting, increase in Va, VMA, and VFA. Rutting in HMA increases with an increase in VMA and VFA, and is insensitive to Vbe, Va, and AC in the study range of these parameters.
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Keywords:
hot-mix asphalt; cracking; rutting; effective binder content; air void; voids-in-mineral aggregates; voids-filled-with asphalt
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MDPI and ACS Style
Islam, M.R.; Kalevela, S.A.; Nesselhauf, S.K. Effects of Mix Factors on the Mechanistic-Empirical Flexible Pavement Design. Designs 2019, 3, 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/designs3030036
AMA Style
Islam MR, Kalevela SA, Nesselhauf SK. Effects of Mix Factors on the Mechanistic-Empirical Flexible Pavement Design. Designs. 2019; 3(3):36. https://doi.org/10.3390/designs3030036
Chicago/Turabian StyleIslam, Md R.; Kalevela, Sylvester A.; Nesselhauf, Shelby K. 2019. "Effects of Mix Factors on the Mechanistic-Empirical Flexible Pavement Design" Designs 3, no. 3: 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/designs3030036
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