Electrical signal characteristics of conductive asphalt concrete in the process of fatigue cracking

Abstract

As a kind of intelligent materials, conductive asphalt concrete has a broad application prospect including melting ice and snow on the pavement, closing cracks in asphalt concrete, sensing pavement damage, and so on. Conductive pavement will be suffered from fatigue failure as conventional pavement in the process of service, and this fatigue damage of internal structure can be induced by electrical signal output. The characteristics of electrical signal variation of conductive asphalt concrete in the process of fatigue cracking were researched in this paper. The whole process was clearly divided into three stages according to resistance changes, and the development of fatigue damage wasn't obvious in stage I and stage II, while in stage III, the synchronicity between the resistance and damage began to appear. Thus, fatigue damage variable D and initial damage value <TEX>$D_0$</TEX> represented by the functions of resistance were introduced in stage III. After calculating the initial damage value <TEX>$D_0$</TEX> under different stress levels, it was concluded that the initial damage value <TEX>$D_0$</TEX> had no noticeable change, just ranged between 0.24 and 0.25. This value represented a critical point which could be used to inform the repair time of early fatigue damage in the conductive asphalt pavement.