Numerical modeling of inelastic structures at loading of steady state rolling

In order to gain a deeper knowledge of the interactions in the coupled tire-pavement-system, e.g. for the future design of durable pavement structures, the paper presents recent results of research in the field of theoretical-numerical asphalt pavement modeling at material and structural level, whereby the focus is on a realistic and numerically efficient computation of pavements under rolling tire load by using the finite element method based on an Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) formulation. Inelastic material descriptions are included into the ALE frame efficiently by a recently developed unsplit history update procedure. New is also the implementation of a viscoelastic cohesive zone model into the ALE pavement formulation to describe the interaction of the single pavement layers. The viscoelastic cohesive zone model is further extended to account for the normal pressure dependent shear behavior of the bonding layer. Another novelty is that thermo-mechanical effects are taken into account by a coupling of the mechanical ALE pavement computation to a transient thermal computation of the pavement cross-section to obtain the varying temperature distributions of the pavement due to climatic impact. Then, each ALE pavement simulation considers the temperature dependent asphalt material model that includes elastic, viscous and plastic behavior at finite strains and the temperature dependent viscoelastic cohesive zone formulation. The temperature dependent material parameters of the asphalt layers and the interfacial layers are fitted to experimental data. Results of coupled tire-pavement computations are presented to demonstrate potential fields of application.