Romain Balieu

Potential Influences on Long-Term Service Performance of Road Infrastructure by Automated Vehicles

Automated vehicles (AVs) have received great attention in recent years, and an automated road transportation sector may become reality in the next decades. Many benefits of AVs have been optimistically predicted, although some benefits may be overestimated because of a lack of thinking from a holistic point of view. From a future perspective, this study investigated the potential consequences to the long-term service performance of practical physical road infrastructure after the advent of the implementation of AVs on a large scale. Specifically, the pavement rutting performance by the possibly changed behaviors, such as the vehicle’s wheel wander, lane capacity, and traffic speed, was examined carefully with the finite element modeling approach. With the use of AVs, the decreased wheel wander and increased lane capacity could bring an accelerated rutting potential, but the increase in traffic speed would negate this effect, which was shown by the simulation results of rut depth. Therefore the influence cannot be judged as positive or negative in general; judgment actually depends much on the practical road and traffic conditions. In the future the physical roads not only might serve for the mobility of the vehicles but also might be capable of enabling other new functions. An early consideration of how to lead the future development of physical road infrastructure toward multifunctionality is emphasized.

Towards an understanding of the structural performance of future electrified roads: a finite element simulation study

ABSTRACT Nowadays, many novel technologies are under investigations for making our road infrastructure function beyond providing mobility and embrace other features that can promote the sustainability development of road transport sector. These new roads are often referred to as multifunctional or ‘smart’ roads. Focus in this paper is given to the structural aspects of a particular smart road solution called electrified road or ‘eRoad’, which is based on enabling the inductive power transfer technology to charge electric vehicles dynamically. Specifically, a new mechanistic-based methodology is firstly presented, using a finite element simulation and an advanced constitutive model for the asphalt concrete materials. Based on this, the mechanical responses of a potential eRoad structure under typical traffic loading conditions are predicted and analysed thoroughly. The main contributions of this paper include thus: (1) introducing a new methodology for analysing a pavement structure purely based on mechanistic principles; (2) utilising this methodology for the investigation of a future multifunctional road pavement structure, such as an eRoad; and (3) providing some practical guidance for an eRoad pavement design and the implementation into practice.

Numerical Prediction of Storage Stability of Polymer-Modified Bitumen: A Coupled Model of Gravity-Driven Flow and Diffusion

A coupled diffusion–flow model by phase-field method is proposed in this paper with the goal of predicting the storage stability of polymer-modified bitumen (PMB). In this study, the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations were coupled with a previously developed phase-field model for PMB phase separation. The coupled model was implemented in a finite element software package with experimentally calibrated parameters and reported data in the literature. Effects of the parameters (bitumen density and dynamic viscosity) that affected the gravity-driven flow and phase separation in PMB were evaluated at 180°C with the simulation results. The results indicate that the coupled diffusion–flow model can predict the storage stability (and instability) of PMBs. A good correlation between the simulation results and the previously reported experimental results (storage stability tube test) was observed. The different gravity-driven phase separation behaviors of PMBs might have resulted from the different composition of the equilibrium phases in the PMBs as well as the different densities and dynamic viscosities of the individual components (polymer and bitumen). A bigger polymer–bitumen density difference, a lower bitumen dynamic viscosity, or both caused a faster flow and separation in the PMB at storage temperature. The investigated variation of bitumen dynamic viscosity had a more significant influence than the investigated variation of bitumen density in this study, but this finding might depend on the specific values of the model parameters. With this study as a foundation, further experimental and numerical studies will be conducted to increase understanding of storage-stable PMB binders and to develop a more efficient test method for determining PMB storage stability.

Sustainable implementation of future smart road solutions: A case study on the electrified road

An important feature of a future smart or multifunctional road is that an intrinsic integration of different new advances into the practical roads should be achieved, in terms of such as Car-to-Roa ...

Multiplicative viscoelastic-viscoplastic damage-healing model for asphalt-concrete materials

A viscoelastic-viscoplastic model based on a thermodynamic approach is developed under finite strain in this paper. By introducing a damage evolution, the proposed model is able to reproduce the behavior of Asphalt-Concrete materials until the complete fracture. Moreover, a recoverable part of the degradation is introduced to reproduce the self-healing observed under a sufficiently long rest period. The proposed model is implemented into a Finite Element code and good correlations between the numerical responses and the experiments have been observed.