ABSTRACT
The use of computational mechanics tools has increased in pavement engineering due to their capacity to assess phenomena that are difficult to simulate in laboratory; and to their overall low cost in comparison to laboratory or field experiments. Thus, computational mechanics could be an efficient technique to understand the mechanical behavior of Permeable Friction Courses (PFC) mixtures and identify the causes of their main distresses. PFCs are gap-graded hot asphalt mixtures that are placed as thin layers over conventional pavements. Although PFC mixtures have several benefits, their main shortcoming is the difficulty to preserve their functionality and durability. This paper discusses the relevance of the geometry that is selected to represent the microstructure of PFCs mixtures in computational mechanics models and introduces a two-dimensional gravimetric method to numerically and randomly build those microstructures. In addition, this paper assesses different input parameters of the proposed gravimetric method and shows how those parameters impact different microstructural characteristics of the generated PFCs microstructures.
