To effectively investigate the mechanical performance of asphalt pavements, software named SAFEM with a user friendly graphical user interface (GUI) was developed. It is based on the semi-analytical finite element (FE) method, which is a three-dimensional FE algorithm that only requires a two-dimensional mesh by incorporating the Fourier series in the third dimension. SAFEM is able to analyze static and dynamic responses of asphalt pavements under stationary or moving loads. Besides linear elasticity, a viscoelastic material model for asphalt layers has also been integrated. Verification was carried out to test and explore the functionality of the software package. We showed that SAFEM is an accurate tool for the fast prediction of asphalt pavement responses, such as the surface deflection and the strain/stress at response points. Furthermore, SAFEM provided a flexible, robust platform for the future development in the numerical simulation of asphalt pavements.
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Liu et al. (2016) studied this question.
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