HIGHER ORDER NUMERICAL HOMOGENIZATION IN MODELING OF ASPHALT CONCRETE.

In this paper, we present an enhanced version of the two-scale numerical homogenization with application to asphalt concrete modeling in the elastic range. We modified the method of effective material parameters tensor assessment for analysis based on the representative volume element (RVE). As the method was tested on asphalt concrete, we also present two possible approaches to geometrical modeling of its internal microstructure. Selected numerical tests were performed to verify the proposed approach. The main novelties of this study, i.e. higher order approximation at the macroscale and modification of boundary conditions at the level of RVE analysis, improved the efficiency of our methodology by error reduction. Practically, we obtained a reduction of NDOF up to 3 orders of magnitude (comparing to full-scale and homogenized analysis) that was accompanied with the introduced error of order of several percent (measured in L₂ norm). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]