Creep response of asphalt concretes: Visco-elasto-plastic modeling

The paper presents and discusses the calibration and validation of a three-dimensional constitutive visco-elasto-plastic model developed for the analysis of the mechanical response of asphalt concretes. The methodology, an inverse problem technique, uses a one-dimensional analytic formulation of the constitutive model and a non-linear constrained optimization based on the Conjugate Gradient algorithm. On the basis of the creep recovery data obtained from an experimental investigation in support of the model calibrati on, it has been verified that the values of the constitutive parameters can be reliably identified. A subsequent comparison between the experimental creep and numerical curves of the 3-D model demonstrated reasonable shifts, confirming the reliability of the identification procedure for the parameters. © Chinese Society of Pavement Engineering.