Influence of Loading Characteristics on Micromechanical Models

Abstract

Researchers employ the micromechanical modeling to understand the behavior of a mix at a component level. In the micromechanical modeling the effective properties of a given mix are calculated on the basis of the mechanical and geometrical properties of individual components. It was notified that although numerical models are able to handle complex compositions and almost realistic mix component material properties, it requires dense meshes and thus large-scale computational facilities. On the other hand, micromechanical models with analytical solutions can produce accurate predictions of the mechanical properties of a mix with less computational demands once they are calibrated/validated. Although researchers have carried out much work on evaluating the predictions by micromechanical models for asphalt mixtures, none of the research studies considered the effect of the loading conditions on the performance of these models. Since micromechanical models are insensitive to loading conditions it is considered that the discrepancies between the predictions and experimental results could be associated with the loading conditions. On the basis of these realizations, in this study the predictions of micromechanical models were compared to the effective modulus of dense asphalt mixture and open asphalt mixture under different loading conditions. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of the loading condition and the type of the mix on the performance of micromechanical models.