ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Bituminous pavements are known to exhibit a thermo-viscoelastic behavior which is strongly dependent on temperature and load velocity. However, for many applications (pavement design, FWG analysis …) it is more convenient to deal with elastic calculations which facilitate parametric studies. But to be accurate such an approximation requires rules defining the right choice of elastic data sets. In this context, this paper presents a method to derive an equivalent elastic system to a multilayer viscoelastic pavement under given conditions of temperature and subject to loads moving at constant speed. Thus, the tool proposed hereafter should ease the elaboration of such rules. This paper explains the proposed method and illustrates its use on the case of a thick flexible pavement. By the way, we reexamine the “10 Hz rule” of the French pavement design method within this framework. We recall that this rule assumes that the equivalent modulus of a bituminous layer is approximately equal to the norm of its complex modulus computed at 10 Hz and at the temperature of the layer.
