Assessing the Ageing Impact on Fatigue Life of Asphalt Concrete

Abstract

The fatigue life of asphalt concrete is often related to environmental condition, loading condition, ageing, material composition and  properties. This work investigates the influence of short and long term ageing of laboratory beam specimens, asphalt content, and testing temperature on fatigue life of asphalt concrete wearing course. Slab samples of (30 x 40x 6) cm have been prepared, beam specimens of (40x 5x 6) cm were cut from the asphalt concrete slab samples. Beam specimens were tested for fatigue life under the influence of three levels of micro strain (250, 400, and [3]750) at (5, 20, and 30) °C before and after practicing long-term aging. It was observed that the fatigue life decreases by (85 and 97) %, (87.5 and 97.4) %, (71.4 and 95.2) % after increasing the applied microstrain from (250 to 400 and 750) μƐ for control mixture and for mixtures subjected to short-and long-term ageing processes respectively. The fatigue life increases by (142.8 and 257.1) %, (34.4 and 57.8) % and (10 and 30) % when the asphalt content increases from (4.4 to 4.9 and 5.4) % for specimens practicing the applied microstrain of (250, 400 and 750) μƐ respectively. It was concluded that the fatigue life increases by a range of (two to fifteen) folds when the testing temperature increases from (5 to 20 and 30)°C respectively.