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Date of Graduation
5-2025
Description
Durable pavement is essential for modern transportation infrastructure, especially in the United States of America which boasts over 8.5 million lane miles of roads and highways. Despite advanced construction techniques, asphalt pavements are susceptible to rutting and cracking, significantly affecting their performance and maintenance costs. Current methods for analyzing rutting and cracking in asphalt mixtures rely on various parameters, leading to measurement variability. This highlights the need for more rigorous analysis to explore the relationship between mix design variables and pavement performance. This research explores the IDEAL-CT and Asphalt Pavement Analyzer (APA) data from mix designs collected by the Arkansas Department of Transportation. Both mix designs had virgin and recycled asphalt mixtures to compare how the percent recycled asphalt affected the susceptibility of rutting and cracking along with other variables. To better understand which asphalt mixture properties impact cracking and rutting in the field, box-and-whisker plots, Pearson correlation, Spearman rank correlation, and Kendall’s Tau analysis methods were used. After running these analysis methods, the CTIndex for virgin mixtures had the highest correlation with the number of design gyrations, while the CTIndex for RAP mixtures had the highest correlation with the theoretical maximum specific gravity. The rut depth correlated heavily with the upper performance grade for both virgin and RAP mixtures. Interestingly, the second highest correlation for the CTIndex was the bulk specific gravity of aggregate mixture for both virgin and RAP mixtures. The rut depth had the second highest correlation with the number of design gyrations for both types of mixtures. The outcome of this research contributes valuable insight into the key factors affecting the asphalt mixture performance and allows other owners to examine how their asphalt mixture properties impact their own performance tests.
Publication Date
2025
Document Type
Book
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering
Degree Level
Undergraduate
Department
Civil Engineering
Advisor/Mentor
Braham, Andrew
Disciplines
Engineering
Keywords
Engineering
Citation
Light, A., Ansari, M., & Braham, A. F. (2025). A Statistical Analysis for Evaluating the Parameters Influencing the Rutting and Cracking Performance of Asphalt Mixtures. 2025 Research Poster Competition. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/hnrcsturpc25/7
