Evaluating the Rutting Performance of Geosynthetic Reinforced Pavement Containing Rubberized Asphalt Mixtures

Abstract Asphalt-pavement rutting is one of the most commonly observed pavement distresses where crumb rubber could be used to decrease this distress. This research illustrates methods of improving the behavior of flexible pavements with a crumb-rubber modifier in asphalt mixtures and with geosynthetic reinforcement in pavements to protect against rutting. The scope of this research is to predict the rutting depth of pavements containing conventional asphalt with a geosynthetic layer using a 3D model an ABAQUS finite-element (FE) program, and compare that with the rutting depth of pavements containing rubberized asphalt. A dynamic creep test was performed on different specimens to obtain material parameters of low creep power. For each type, a model was developed and then the finite-element method was used to estimate the rut depth of a pavement structure by incorporating realistic material properties of a geosynthetic, asphalt mixture, and base, subbase, and subgrade layers. The results show that crumb rubber causes reduction in rut depth by 36 %. By conducting analytical finite-element modeling in ABAQUS, it found that using geosynthetic in the bottom of the first-, second-, third-, and fourth-quarter causes rut-depth reduction of 74 %, 68 %, 34 %, and 0.5 %, respectively. Therefore, using the geosynthetics on a pavement containing conventional asphalt mixtures is an effective way of decreasing the rut depth.