A review on evaluation of crack resistance of asphalt mixture by semi-circular bending test

Although there are many kinds of fracture tests to choose from in evaluating the crack resistance of asphalt mixture, the semi-circular bending (SCB) test has attracted a lot of attention in the academic road engineering community because of its simplicity, stability, and flexibility in testing and evaluation. The SCB test has become a common method to study the cracking resistance of asphalt mixture in recent years. This paper mainly summarizes the overview of the SCB test, summarizes some research results and common characterization parameters of the SCB test method in monotone test and fatigue test in recent years, and predicts and suggests the research direction of the SCB test in the future. It is found that the research on the monotonic SCB test is more comprehensive, and the research on the SCB fatigue test needs to be further improved in the aspects of loading mode, characterization parameter selection, and so on. Researchers can flexibly adjust the geometric dimensions and the test parameters of semi-cylindrical specimens, and conduct comprehensive analysis combined with the results of numerical simulation. The crack resistance of asphalt mixture can be comprehensively evaluated by fracture energy, fracture toughness, stiffness, flexibility index and other fracture indicators, combined with the crack propagation of the specimen. The analysis of numerical simulation can confirm the test results. In order to standardize the setting of fatigue parameters for future application, it is necessary to standardize the setting of bending performance.