Study of rutting effect on the mechanical behavior of asphalt pavement under moving loads

Rutting is one of the most critical distresses influenced the asphalt pavement performance and its service life. Due to the complexity of the mechanical asphalt pavement responses, to study the mechanical behavior of this material under applying loads, a thermodynamically consistent visco- elastic visco- plastic visco- damage constitutive model has been presented in the implicit time discrete form to predict their mechanical responses within the framework pf the finite element method in software ABAQUS- Standard. It is worthy to mention that employing an implicit time discretization technique reduces the computational cost and a more stable solution is found. In this work, rutting phenomenon and prediction of the asphalt pavement service life has been investigated under three types of moving loading regimes, which forty percent of rutting difference has been obtained by comparing the pulse and equivalent loadings under moving load that would cause erroneous predictions in asphalt pavement service life.