Experimental study on the fatigue cracking resistance of asphalt concrete pavement reinforced with synthetic meshes

This study investigates fatigue cracking resistance of asphalt concrete pavement beam specimens operating under cyclic loading conditions and undergoing fatigue cracking. The task is to establish the regularities of fatigue cracking resistance of asphalt concrete beam specimens reinforced with Adfors GlasGrid GG50, Adfors GlasGrid GG100, and Adfors GlasGrid CG50L geogrids. Fatigue cracking resistance of asphalt concrete beam specimens reinforced with Adfors GlasGrid geogrids under the action of sinusoidal loading with a frequency of 10 Hz was examined experimentally. The four-point bending method was accepted as the criterion for assessing fatigue durability when testing reinforced asphalt concrete beam specimens. Under the action of cyclic loading, the number of load application cycles was adopted, during which the initial complex modulus of rigidity that is observed after the first 100 load cycles would decrease by 50%. It was found that when reinforcing asphalt concrete beam specimens with Adfors GlasGrid GG50 geogrid, the average number of cycles to lose 50% of the complex modulus of rigidity reached 68,460 load cycles during the application of loads. When reinforcing with Adfors GlasGrid GG100 geogrid, 76,900 load cycles, and when reinforcing asphalt concrete beam specimens with Adfors GlasGrid CG50L geogrid, 153,127 load cycles were applied. In the absence of asphalt concrete reinforcement with geogrids, the average number of load cycles was 25,975 cycles. When losing 50% of the complex modulus of rigidity, it was found that the increase in the number of cycles in relation to beam specimens without geogrid reinforcement was 2.6 times when reinforcing beam specimens with Adfors GlasGrid GG50 geogrids. When reinforced with Adfors GlasGrid GG100 geogrids, this indicator was 3.0, and when reinforced with Adfors GlasGrid CG50L geogrids, it was 5.9.