CALIBRATION OF THE M-E PDG MODEL FOR NON CONVENTIONAL ASPHALT CONCRETE MATERIALS

The Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide (M-E PDG) is a very powerful pavement design tool but it includes empirical distress models calibrated only for conventional bituminous materials. Nowadays non conventional asphalt concrete materials are often used in flexible and semirigid pavements. The implementation of these new materials in the M-E PDG tool requires the calibration of the distress models based on experimental data from in-service pavements or laboratory test results. In this paper the calibration of the M-E PDG Asphalt Concrete Fatigue and Asphalt Concrete Rutting models is presented for three type of non conventional materials: asphalt concrete with modified asphalt binder, porous asphalt and foamed bitumen asphalt concrete. The result are presented in terms of the required calibration factors, caveats and accuracy of the calibrated functions. The issues of modeling multilayered structures with different asphalt concrete materials is also addressed.