Permeability and bleeding of asphalt concrete using mixture theory

Abstract

Distress due to water induced damage and bleeding accelerates the failure of an asphalt concrete pavement due to damage mechanisms such as fatigue cracking, rutting, stripping etc. One of the important variables used while modeling water induced damage for asphalt concrete pavement is permeability. This study uses the framework developed to model the movement of air voids in asphalt concrete in a previous study by the authors [cf. J. Murali Krishnan, C. Lakshmana Rao, International Journal of Engineering Science, 38 (2000) 1331]. The assumption of constant permeability in the theory of consolidation by Terzaghi is relaxed and a linear relation is proposed between permeability and air voids. Voids filled with asphalt (VFA) are proposed as a parameter to model bleeding of asphalt concrete, and its variation for different loading and mixture condition is studied.