Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-339-06163-4
Ph.D.
Civil Engineering
The University of New Mexico
2015
Fatigue damage can be defined by a decrease in stiffness of Asphalt Concrete (AC) under repeated traffic loading. For each cycle of traffic loading, tensile strain develops at the bottom of AC layer of an asphalt pavement. Some localized damages occur in the material at minute-scale due to this developed tensile strain. These damages cause decrease in stiffness (E) of AC. Damage caused by a single vehicle is small. However the accumulated damage is not small if a large number of vehicles are considered over the design life of an asphalt pavement. After certain level of damage accumulation, bottom-up fatigue cracking initiates and forms alligator cracking at the surface.