Fatigue performance of graphene oxide modified asphalt mixture: experimental investigation and response surface methodology

Fatigue in asphalt pavements is a major deterioration caused by repeated traffic loading. The objectives of this research were to investigate the fatigue performance of graphene oxide (GO) modified asphalt mixtures and evaluate the influence of temperature and stress level on the fatigue life of GO asphalt mixtures using response surface methodology (RSM). For this purpose, an indirect tensile fatigue test was conducted. The results showed that the application of GO increased the fatigue life of the asphalt mixture. The RSM analysis proposed a quadratic model with a high determination coefficient (R-2 = 0.9977) to fit the experimental data. The ANOVA test showed that temperature, stress level, and GO percentage had a pronounced effect on the fatigue performance of the mixture. Furthermore, multi-objective optimization was used to achieve an optimized mixture proportion and verify the model's reliability by conducting validation experiments. The predicted and actual results were found to be in excellent agreement, with a variation of only 2.12%, suggesting that the model can accurately predict the fatigue life of the GO-modified asphalt mixture.