Impact of freeze-thaw cycles on compressive characteristics of asphalt mixture in cold regions

Abstract

Low average temperature, large temperature difference and continual freeze-thaw (F-T) cycles have significant impacts on mechanical property of asphalt pavement. F-T cycles test was applied to illustrate the mixtures’ compressive characteristics. Exponential model was applied to analyze the variation of compressive characteristics with F-T cycles; Loss ratio model and Logistic model were used to present the deterioration trend with the increase of F-T cycles. ANOVA was applied to show the significant impact of F-T cycles and asphalt-aggregate ratio. The experiment results show that the compressive strength and resilient modulus decline with increasing F-T cycles; the degradation is sharp during the initial F-T cycles, after 8 F-T cycles it turns to gentle. ANOVA results show that F-T cycles, and asphalt-aggregate ratio have significant influence on the compressive characteristics. Exponential model, Loss ratio model and Logistic model are significantly fitting the test data from statistics view. These models well reflect the compressive characteristics of asphalt mixture degradation trend with increasing F-T cycles.

Keywords

freeze-thaw cycles test / compressive strength / resilient modulus / regression models

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