Abstract:
Despite the importance of the thermal conductivity (k) to the study of
pavement thermal behaviors, it is still a challenging task for engineers to come up
with an efficient method for its determination without laborious laboratory measurements.
Recently some computer-aided approaches were proposed to overcome the
mentioned difficulty but still suffered from time-consuming and inefficient computation.
This study presents a hybrid methodology for the determination of k value with
a totally automatic program, employing genetic algorithm (GA) to achieving efficient
model calibrations, coupled with the finite element simulation tomake estimations of
the thermal conductivity of the asphalt mixtures. The improved performance of the
proposed method is demonstrated by a 2-D row-column structure model example
to achieve a higher accuracy and efficiency existing approaches under the same
conditions.
