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L. Eberhardsteiner, B. Hofko, R. Blab:
"Multiscale modeling to predict hot mix asphalt stiffness behavior";
Talk: 4th Chinese European Workshop, Delft; 2016-06-29 - 2016-07-01; in: "Functional Pavement Design: Proceedings of the 4th Chinese-European Workshop on Functional Pavement Design", (2016), ISBN: 9781138029248; 7 pages.

Fatigue behavior of hot mix asphalt (HMA) is the important factor, when it comes to evaluate the structural lifetime of bituminous pavement constructions (pavement design). Thereby, the progress of fatigue is strongly affected by resulting stresses in the bituminous layers due to traffic and/or temperature change, whereat HMA stiffness has huge impact on the magnitude of these stresses and, hence, on the design result. It is obvious that a reliable characterization and prediction of HMA stiffness is crucial. A suitable way for the description of the viscoelastic response of a material is continuum micromechanics, where the mechanical, volumetric and morphologic properties of the constituents of the material are considered to predict the homogenized, "overall" material behavior. Thereby, the material is observed on different, reasonably chosen lengths scales allowing for a description of mechanical effects where they occur. These model assumptions were validated extensively showing a remarkable accordance between experimental results obtained from 4PBB-PR tests and model predictions with only the mechanical properties of the constituents (bitumen, aggregate) and the volumetric composition as model input. The results of this investigation suggest that applying the presented technique can lead to a significant reduction of experimental efforts in mix design.