Measuring Fatigue Damages from an Instrumented Pavement Section due to Day-Night and Yearly Temperature Rise and Fall in Desert Land of the West

This study measures the fatigue damage due to temperature fluctuations and, hence, the fatigue life of asphalt concrete using data from an instrumentation pavement section in the desert land of New Mexico for real time climate conditions. As a first step, fatigue life prediction models have been developed for both vehicle and temperature fluctuations based on stiffness and strain of Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) collected from the instrumentation section located on Interstate 40 (I-40) in New Mexico. In the second step, traffic and thermal strains at the bottom of asphalt concrete are measured by Horizontal Asphalt Strain Gauges (HASGs). In the third step, using these strain values, fatigue damage at the bottom of asphalt concrete is determined. Results show that thermal damage is responsible for 98.2% of total fatigue damage in asphalt concrete. In addition, yearly temperature fluctuation produces greater damage (95.8% of total damage) than the damage caused by daily temperature variations (2.4% of total damage).