Lisa Lövqvist

Freeze-thaw cycles in combination with long-term moisture exposure and traffic is a major threat to the performance of asphalt pavements. To enable characterisation and understanding of the damage process, this paper presents a new thermodynamics-based multiscale model of freeze-thaw damage in asphalt mixtures which also accounts for the damage due to moisture and traffic. The developed model consists of a microscale and a macroscale and is thereby able to account for the effect of the different microscale material components on the homogenous macroscale damage development. Additionally, the model is able to account for the acceleration of freeze-thaw damage which occurs when moisture infiltrates a damaged pavement with an increased effective air void content between freeze-thaw cycles. The novelty of the model lies in the ability to simulate the in-time acceleration of damage, the combined deteriorating effect of freeze-thaw cycles, moisture and traffic, as well as the coupling of the two scales to enable accurate predictions and understanding of the damage evolution. These features are demonstrated through a set of parametric examples which demonstrate the importance of including the effect of long-term moisture exposure and freeze-thaw cycles as well as the coupling between the different damage modes.

Freeze-thaw damage in asphalt pavements is a complex phenomenon dependent on many parameters such as moisture infiltration, temperature and mechanical properties of the asphalt constituents as well as the interface between them. As a first step in creating a comprehensive multiscale model including all of these parameters, a micromechanical model has been developed. This model couples the infiltration of moisture and the associated damage, the expansion caused by the water inside the air voids freezing, and the mechanical damage. The expansion of the air voids is implemented by applying a volumetric expansion in the air voids dependent on the temperature. The cohesive damage in the mastic and adhesive damage in the mastic-aggregate interface are included by implementing an energy-based damage model and the cohesive zone model, respectively. To show the capabilities of the model, the effect of different parameters (the number of freeze-thaw cycles, the gradation of the microstructure, and the freezing time) was investigated through simulations. From the analyses it was concluded that the model was capable of capturing the deteriorating effect of an increasing number of freeze-thaw cycles, and was sensitive to the freezing time in the freeze-thaw cycles.