The importance of pavement–vehicle interaction on fuel use is potentially large enough to warrant further investigation. Ever-growing traffic volumes world-wide make rolling resistance in the pavement life-cycle important for all roads. Pavement structural response contributes to rolling resistance and excess fuel consumption by dissipating vehicle energy in the pavement, which can be modelled as material hysteresis or delayed surface displacement causing the tire to push against the side of the deflection bowl. In this study, a comprehensive numerical modelling factorial is developed to determine the response of pavement structures under a wide range of contributing factors with modelling of asphalt pavement energy dissipation due to the viscoelastic structural response. The modelling considered the material-induced dissipated energy under moving traffic using a quasi-dynamic procedure incorporating viscoelastic response and damping mechanisms. Using the developed FE models and Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) test results, the dissipated energy responses for several different conditions were numerically quantified for ten field sections. Dissipated energy outputs of 720 moving load models were used to develop three reliable regression models over a wide range of variables to predict dissipated energy response without the need to routinely perform the finite element simulations.

Key words: Energy dissipation, fuel consumption, numerical modelling, finite element analysis, moving load model