Evaluation of fatigue cracking performance in a debonded asphalt pavement

An asphalt pavement typically has one or more asphalt concrete layers over underlying granular materials. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of debonded pavement structures on fatigue cracking performance using computational analysis program (FlexPAVE™). Both pavement response analysis and pavement performance analysis were conducted to determine the distribution of stresses and strains at the surface and interface of asphalt layers, and to evaluate fatigue cracking performance of debonded pavement structures. A debonded pavement structure can result in much higher tensile stress levels than the fully bonded case, which would consequently lead to the poorer fatigue cracking performance. The FlexPAVE™ simulation results revealed that the debonded surface layers in an asphalt pavement could lead to a reduction of the fatigue performance life of the pavement structure by approximately 90%.