Numerical and Experimental Predictions of Pavement Texture Effects on Vehicle Fuel Consumption

Abstract

119 litres is the average annual amount of fuel used by a typical car to overcome rolling resistance (RR) depending not only on vehicle-related factors but also pavement-related ones. By rearranging surface texture, fuel consumption may decrease bringing substantial long-term socio-economic benefits, which would help in meeting EU limits on CO2 (95 g/km until 2021) fostering sustainable construction of pavements. This paper outlines a newly developed multi-scale 3-D numerical model and two in-laboratory and one in-situ experimental tests to calculate micro-distortional RR due to indentation of aggregates into visco-elastic tread compound. Two computational and two experimental approaches to quantify micro-distortional RR were developed. The contact forces appeared of a reasonable distribution and magnitude. It was found that micro-distortional RR is higher on a rougher/sparsely packed surface compared to a smoother/tightly packed case; longitudinally grooved concrete was the most energy efficient texture studied. The predictions were confirmed qualitatively using the experiments.

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• https://zenodo.org/record/1440996 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

• https://zenodo.org/record/1440996,

http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1440995 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

• https://zenodo.org/record/1440996,

http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1440996 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

DOIS: 10.5281/zenodo.1440996 10.5281/zenodo.1440995