Research on vehicle-asphalt pavement interaction and micro-structure by discrete element method

Abstract

Asphalt mixture is composed of coarse aggregate, fine aggregate, mineral powder, asphalt, etc., with heterogeneous, discontinuous characteristics. The mechanical behavior of asphalt mixture particles under vehicle load is very complicated. And the asphalt pavement will be damaged in the early bearing stage, which is closely related to the mechanical behavior between the particles of the mixture. In order to study the mechanical response of asphalt mixture particles under vehicle load, a 2 DOF (degrees of freedom) 1/4 vehicle model composed of mass block–spring-damper was constructed in this paper. In this model, the mechanical response and velocity of particles in pavement structure layer are solved by programming. The results show that the vertical displacement of the pavement calculated by the discrete element method is less than 8.9% of that calculated by the finite element method, which indicates that the discrete element method is more feasible.