Accounting for Temperature Susceptibility of Asphalt Stiffness When Designing Bonded Concrete Overlays of Asphalt Pavements

AbstractA bonded concrete overlay of asphalt (BCOA), also known as whitetopping, is a thin concrete overlay placed upon a distressed asphalt pavement. The asphalt-resilient modulus is kept constant in current BCOA design procedures. This practice results in an underestimation of the damage as compared to when the hourly temperature variation of the asphalt is considered. The framework to establish an equivalent asphalt modulus involves generating a database of hourly middepth asphalt temperatures. This database should include hourly temperatures for different BCOA structures and a large range of geographical locations representing different climatic conditions. The hourly middepth asphalt temperatures are then used to generate hourly asphalt moduli using master curves. Through fatigue equivalency, the equivalent asphalt moduli are calculated for each month. In order to establish the relationship between the asphalt modulus and middepth temperature, the United States was divided into seven different zones ...