Simplified Analytical Approach to Predicting Asphalt Pavement Temperature

Abstract

The temperature profile within the asphalt layer of a flexible pavement plays an important role in the design of hot-mix asphalt and in the performance models of asphalt concrete materials such as low-temperature cracking and asphalt binder oxidation. In this paper, the time-dependent temperature profile within an asphalt concrete layer is modeled as the heat conduction problem in a one-layer pavement system, where the surface boundary condition is simply the pavement surface-temperature history during the time period of interest. An infinite series solution for asphalt layer temperature prediction was derived using measured pavement surface temperatures. The main mathematical tools employed in deriving the analytical solution are separation of variables and Duhamel’s principle. Mathematically, the infinite series are proven to converge uniformly over the finite physical domain at a fixed time