Cracking in asphalt concrete

Fatigue resistance of asphalt concrete is usually evaluated by means of fatigue tests, like repeated load four point bending tests. These tests are rather time consuming and, therefore, not suited for performance based specifications. In this article a new, faster procedure to determine the fatigue characteristics is introduced. The procedure is based on a combination of theory and experiments. Both the theorectical background and the experiments that were used are discussed in this article. Furthermore, fatigue relations that were developed using the new procedure and relations developped using classical fatigue tests, are compared.Road & Railroad Research LaboratoryCivil Engineering and Geoscience