ABSTRACT
A composite pavement structure is considered composed of a bituminous upper layer over a base cement layer (SETRA-LCPC, 1998). The interface quality between layers highly governs the pavement behavior. Thus, the poor quality of the interface produces high tensile stresses in the layers, which leads to an increase of damage fatigue (Bats, 1991). The usual methods to characterize pavement interfaces are based on the continuum mechanics and impose displacement and stress conditions on adjacent layers faces.Alternative microstructural approaches on the scale of grains were used for analyzing the interface behavior of noncohesive layers (Baylac 2001; Masson & Martinez 2000;Thornton & Zhang 2001). Such approaches were used also for modeling cohesive granular materials (Preechawuttipong 2002; Radjaï 1998; Delenne 2002).
