VISCO-ELASTO-PLASTIC CONSITITUTIVE LAW FOR A BITUMINOUS MIXTURE UNDER REPEATED LOADING.

A constitutive law for a bituminous mixture subjected to repeated loading is presented. The elastic, plastic, viscoelastic, and viscoplastic strain components are incorporated into the model as they are simultaneously present in the loading process. The model parameters are extracted from a series of repeated uniaxial creep and creep recovery experiments conducted under constant compression stress. The experiments were performed at constant temperatures for various stress levels, time periods, and numbers of cycles. The elastic strain is found to depend solely and linearly on the stress. The plastic strain is linearly proportional to stress and exhibits a power-law dependence on the number of loading cycles. The viscoelastic strain is nonlinear with respect to stress and is governed by a power law of time. The viscoplastic strain component is nonlinear with respect to stress and thus can be represented by the product of a second-order polynomial of stress and two power laws of time and number of cycles, respectively.