Abstract
This paper pays attention to brittle fracture phenomenon at low temperature to investigate the cause of longitudinal surface cracking of asphalt pavement on steel deck bridges, and examined fractue properties around the brittle point of asphalt mixtures with tensile tests and FEM analysis. The results revealed that the asphalt mixtures considered in this study have different fracture properties and a certain mixture possibly fracrures under a pareticular loading and temperature condition where the other materials do not. Based on the brittle point and failure tensile strain, a method of numerically evaluating the possibility of occurrence of surface cracking on an asphalt mixture was developed, which can be easily applied to new types of asphalt materials and various types of bridge structures. This method was validated by long term field observation on an actual pavement on a steel deck. (It allows the geneal and quantitative evaluation of brittle pavement fracture, which has never been possible.)
