Analysis of asphalt mix surface-Tread rubber interaction by using finite element method

Abstract

The surface texture of the pavement plays a very important role in deriving the frictional properties at the tire rubber-pavement interface. Particularly, the hysteretic friction due to viscoelastic deformations of rubber depends mainly on the pavement surface texture. In the present paper, the effect of micromechanical pavement surface morphology on rubber block friction was brought in by comparing the friction results for three different asphalt mix morphological surfaces, namely, Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA), Ultra-Thin Surfacing (UTS) and Porous Asphalt (PA). The asphalt surface morphologies of these mixes were captured by using an X-ray tomographer; from which the resulting images micromechanical finite element (FE) meshes for SMA, UTS and PA pavements were developed by means of the SimpleWare software (2011). These asphalt meshes were combined with the contact algorithm for the micromechanical analysis of the contact problem of rough surfaces.