Thermal stresses of asphalt pavement under dependence of material characteristics on reference temperature

This thesis presents an analytical study of thermal stresses of asphalt pavement under dependence of material characteristics on reference temperature. In the analysis, flexible pavement is regarded as a multi-layered elastic half-space axisymmetrical system. Firstly, thermo-elastic theory is used to describe thermal stresses of a multi-layered system, while the temperature-dependent material characteristics are considered. Then Laplace transformation and Hankel transformation with respect to time and radial, respectively, are utilized for thermo-elastic equations of equilibrium. In addition, the transfer matrix method is applied to derive general solutions for the multi-layered problem. Finally, the resulting formulation is applied to calculate thermal stresses in the low temperature cracking problem of asphalt pavement. Thermal stress is calculated and compared with the case that material characteristics are supposed to be constant to show the remarkable impact of temperature-dependent material characteristics on thermal stresses of asphalt pavement.