Dynamic Response of Asphalt Pavement with Top-Down Crack under Vehicle Load

Top-down cracking is a typical type of damage to asphalt pavement that significantly impacts the traffic safety and reduces the pavement's service life. To understand the mechanism and the regularity of the crack propagation in asphalt layers, the dynamic responds of an asphalt pavement containing a top-down crack were derived. An asphalt pavement containing a top-down crack was modeled as an elastic multi-layered system. The Fourier and Laplace transform and inverse transform were introduced to transform the partial differential equations to ordinary differential equations for solving the governing equations. Lobatto-Chebyshev integration formula, as a numerical method, was used to gain the numerical results of the singular integral equation in Laplace domain. Numerical analyses were conducted to illustrate the influences on the crack propagation in the asphalt pavement. The procedure developed in this study provides an effective tool for asphalt pavement performance evaluation and finding effective maintenance measures for cracked asphalt pavement.