Influence of the Mesoscopic Viscoelastic Contact Model on Characterizing the Rheological Behavior of Asphalt Concrete in the DEM Simulation

The numerical simulation based on the discrete element method (DEM) is popular to analyze the material behavior of asphalt concrete in recent years because of the advantage of the DEM in characterizing the heterogeneous microstructures. As a type of viscoelastic material, the rheological behavior of asphalt concrete is represented depending on the mesoscopic viscoelastic contact model between two particles in a contact in DEM simulations. However, what is missing in the existing literature studies is analysis of the influence of the mesoscopic viscoelastic contact models. Hence, the existing mesoscopic viscoelastic contact models are employed to build different types of DEM numerical samples of asphalt concrete in this study. Laboratory tests and the corresponding numerical tests at different temperatures and frequencies are implemented to investigate the difference in simulation precision in the case of using different mesoscopic viscoelastic contact models via the rheological index of dynamic modulus and phase angle. The results show the following: (1) the mesoscopic generalized Maxwell contact model provides the best simulation precision at low temperatures; (2) the mesoscopic generalized Kelvin contact model shows an improved precision at high temperatures; and (3) although the mesoscopic Burgers contact model has the simplest mathematical structure, the simulation precisions are obviously lower than those of the other two contact models, particularly when simulating the phase angle at low temperatures and frequencies. The results will be beneficial to select the appropriate mesoscopic contact model for the DEM modeling of asphalt concrete according to the loading conditions.

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