An Efficient Computation for the Multiaxial Viscoelastic Continuum Damage Analysis of Pavements

An efficient computation method that allows for evaluating the capability of pavement structures subjected to realistic loading conditions on fatigue cracking is important for pavement engineers. This study developed a fast and reliable computation algorithm, based on evaluating the fatigue cracking resistance of flexible pavements using the principle of the multiaxial Viscoelastic Continuum Damage Mechanics (VECD). For this purpose, a viscoelastic analysis was derived for the viscoelastic multilayered pavement systems under a moving load and used for integrating the multiaxial VECD model into the developed solution. Because of the analytical nature of the algorithm, stiffness reduction by means of pseudo stiffness could be directly evaluated at any location and at any loading repetition over a three-dimensional pavement structure. The resulted evaluation indicated that overall fatigue cracking performance of pavement structures could be assessed by the bottom pseudo stiffness; however, the probability of top-down cracking was high in pavement structures with thick asphalt layers.