Heavy impact compaction modeling and analysis on unbound paving mixtures

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

12-2-2016

Department

Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering

Abstract

Performance of unbound paving mixture is highly dependent on the compaction process. The mixture compaction ability may be impacted by various factors, such as aggregate morphological features, compaction energy, boundary conditions. In order to improve fundamental understandings of mixture compaction, this chapter presents a discrete element modeling approach for analyzing and evaluating unbound paving mixture compaction ability under impaction loads. In this research, aggregate morphological features were simulated through processing individual aggregate X-ray CT images and the discrete element models were built with the image-based realistic aggregate particles. The digital samples of three mix gradations were built through randomly spreading the image-based aggregate particles into the cylinder containers. The mix compaction process was simulated under the gravity and impaction loading conditions. The internal stress and the distribution of particle-particle contacts were recorded during the simulation. Through this study, it was observed that 2.36–4.75 mm aggregates played significant roles both in contacts and stress distribution for all gradations; internal stress of mix tended to narrow down to several ranges of aggregates; and fine gradations would have more centralize stress distribution while coarse gradations would have a wider ranges.

Publication Title

Springer Proceedings in Physics

ISBN

978-981-10-1926-5

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