Abstract
A heat transfer model was developed to predict a transient thermal behavior of asphalt concrete during service life at different weather conditions. The developed model has the capability to predict the distribution of temperature field with respect to time within the Hot-Mix asphalt body based on surrounding environmental conditions. This will greatly help pavement engineers to select the suitable asphalt grade to achieve the best pavement performance and avoid pavement distresses might be caused due to extreme pavement temperatures. These distresses include fatigue cracks, rutting, and thermal cracking. The resulted model required data on asphalt mixture, incident radiation, surface, and ambient temperatures in addition to thermal properties of Hot-Mix asphalt including absorptivity, heat transfer coefficient, and the emissivity. A sensitivity analyses was
performed to study the impact of a number of thermal
environmental and pavement geometric parameters on predicted temperature responses. The results of analysis indicated that the incident radiation, absorptivity, and the heat transfer coefficient have the most significant effect on Hot-Mix asphalt temperature. Also, the emissivity has insignificant effect on surface temperature Hot-Mix asphalt.