Experimental and Multi-Scale Damage and Healing Characterization of Asphaltic Road Materials: Experimental and Computational Studies

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Road transportation infrastructure plays a direct supportive role to the Canadian economy. Unfortunately, the deteriorated condition state of much of Canada's road infrastructure has created a significant liability for all Canadians, present and future. In the past, the road industry has predominantly relied on empirical based engineering methods for the road structural design and materials selection. Because they are historic based, these traditional empirical road engineering methods are limited because they cannot explicitly quantify road field performance across different traffic, innovative road materials, innovative road structural designs, and alternative road asset management policies. This proposal focuses on the development of mechanistic based road engineering and asset management systems for improved design and materials specifications for Canadian roads. This research proposes to incorporate multi-scale damage-healing mechanics into the existing non-linear-orthotropic continuum road engineering design and materials design systems. In the proposed research, a multi-scale road modeling framework that predicts the damage and healing of road materials in Canadian conditions utilizing the Canadian Light Source will validate damage and healing models of various Canadian asphaltic concrete pavements investigated. This research will explore diverse aspaltic road systems based on laboratory characterization and evaluation of field performance test sections. This research will also evaluate the holistic economics associated with improved whole life road performance prediction to help Canada optimize infrastructure investment based on life cycle performance prediction in optimized capital investment framework that is based on science instead of relying on traditional capital budget allocation approaches. This research is uniquely capable to employ the Canadian Light Source for the prediction and validation of microfracture and plasticity flow within Canadian asphaltic pavements and will provide scientific based pavement performance predictions of diverse Canadian pavements and field state conditions.