Homogenization of the elastic-viscoplastic damage behavior of asphalt mixtures based on the mesomechanical Mori–Tanaka method

To improve the efficiency and accuracy in characterizing the nonlinear behavior of multi-phased asphalt mixtures and to further facilitate asphalt pavement design based on the nonlinear properties, this study proposes a homogenized method for the elastic-viscoplastic-damage constitutive model. The Drucker–Prager-type yield surfaces and non-association flow rule were employed to describe the viscoplastic strain of asphalt materials. The continuum damage mechanics (CDM) were incorporated to characterize the evolutions of internal micro-cracks or micro-voids in structures. The mesomechanical Mori–Tanaka (MT) method was used to yield the homogenized nonlinear strain components within multi-phase structures. The proposed constitutive model was then implemented in finite element (FE) simulations based on a self-developed subroutine. Several case studies were conducted, in which composite structures with one inclusion were simulated under constant stress and strain loading rate. Amongst the composite structures, the inclusions with various volume contents and shapes were taken into account. In addition, the influence of air voids in structures was considered by defining the zero stiffness for inclusions. The results indicated that the nonlinear behavior of composite with single aggregate or air void can be effectively represented using the proposed method. Furthermore, by coupling the homogenized nonlinear constitutive relation into the locally homogenous model from previous work, not only was the viscoplastic-damage behavior of the composite with multiple inclusions effectively demonstrated by the definition of the nonlinear material, but the internal heterogeneous feature was also precisely represented by the local cells. Therefore, the proposed homogenized method can effectively predict the viscoplastic and damage behavior of asphalt mixtures with various inclusions by simply specifying the parameters in the FE simulations.