Uni- and tri-axial tests and property characterization for thermomechanical effect on hydrated lime modified asphalt concrete

Abstract

Permanent deformation, fatigue and thermal cracking are the three typical distresses of flexible pavement. Using hydrated lime (HL) into the conventional limestone mineral additive has been widely practiced, including in Europe, to improve the mechanical properties of hot mix asphalt (HMA) concrete and as the result the durability of the constructed pavement. Large number of experimental studies have been reported to find the optimum addition of HL for the improvement on HMA concrete mechanical properties, moisture susceptibility and fatigue resistance. Pavement in service is under complex thermomechanical stress-strain conditions due to coupled atmospheric and surrounding environment temperature variation and the traffic loading. To predict and analyse the performance of pavement structures the data only from uniaxial compressive test for the resilient modulus and permanent deformation would be not enough. However, so far, the data of HL modified HMA concrete under complex loading conditions are still not well informatively complete. To contribute new knowledge, this paper reports an experimental study of both uni- and tri-axial tests for the asphalt concrete using HL into mineral additive for the mixes designed for the applications of wearing, levelling, and base layers, respectively. All the tests were conducted under three controlled temperatures and four stress deviations. The test results have showed that, for all three types of mixes, the permanent deformation of the HL mixes is less than the ones of no HL addition. The degree of the improvement on permanent deformation resistance using HL is much pronounced at high stress deviation states. The results have also showed that the resilient modulus strongly depends on the temperature and stress deviation while the mixes of HL addition demonstrate higher rigidity. At last, mathematical characterization models have been proposed for the measured material properties. A numerical simulation case study has been performed to test and demonstrate the application of the proposed unified property model.