An inverse analysis approach to determine fatigue performance of bituminous mixes

In pavement engineering, fatigue resistance is evaluated using different tests protocols and different specimen geometries. The dependency of the specimen shape geometry on fatigue performance does not allow the evolution of intrinsic material properties. This paper deals with the calibration of intrinsic fatigue damage parameters for bituminous materials. A fatigue damage model is implemented. The decrease of stiffness of the specimen during fatigue tests for different laboratory testing conditions is calculated from finite element computations. An inverse optimization technique is used in order to adjust the fatigue damage parameters on bending fatigue tests. A Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is implemented to fit the finite element specimen global response on experimental results. An application on bending laboratory fatigue tests is presented to illustrate the applicability of the method for pavement engineering.