Bursa » Monitoring And Measurement Of Healing In Asphalt Mixtures

KTH in Stockholm is the largest and oldest technical university in Sweden. No less than one-third of Sweden’s technical research and engineering education capacity at university level is provided by KTH. Education and research spans from natural sciences to all branches of engineering and includes architecture, industrial management and urban planning. There are a total of just over 14,000 first and second level students and more than 1,700 doctoral students. KTH has almost 4,600 employees.

The School of Architecture and the Built Environment, ABE (Skolan för Arkitektur och samhällsbyggnad) is one of ten schools at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). Our research and educational program regards the future of our societies; how cities, buildings and infrastructure will be designed and built, how institutions and regulatory systems should be developed to produce a good living environment, and how to provide good development conditions for business.

Infrastructure materials play not only a crucial role on the efficiency of urban mobility but also have a significant impact on the environmentally (un)friendliness of the infrastructure sector. Can we develop new materials that need much less energy and create less emissions, but with completely predictable and highly sustainable long-term behavior?

This is one of the important questions we aim to answer within the KTH Road2Science Center where we are now looking for a motivated and multi-disciplinary talented PhD student to join our team. Your tasks will be to establish an experimental and modeling framework to characterize damage healing processes in asphalt mixtures.

Project Description

Healing potential of asphalt mixtures is one of the major factors controlling mixtures fatigue life. It is thus very important to be able to characterize mixtures healing properties and to predict the effect of healing on materials performance in the field. In state of practice pavement design methods, the effect of healing on pavement performance is accounted for through the empirical calibration parameters. This precludes quantitative estimates of the effects the material choice, traffic and environmental factors have on healing processes in the asphalt materials in the field. In order to overcome that shortcoming, an explicit healing model is introduced in a new Calibrated Mechanistic pavement design procedure being developed at Highway and Railway Engineering Division, KTH. The current healing model is however still based on empirical observations and does not allow to link fundamental material properties with healing. It is therefore intention of the present project to develop a new test method to characterize healing in asphalt mixtures and establish a new healing model based on fundamental material properties.

The results of the project will allow to gain better understanding of the fundamental mechanisms controlling healing properties of asphalt, addressing thus one of the crucial empirical components in the current design frameworks. Furthermore, an experimental methods developed under the project will allow for characterization of asphalt materials with respect to their healing capabilities, providing thus a tool to develop materials with improved healing properties and facilitate implementation of novel materials in road construction.

Eligibility and Assessment Criteria

The potential candidate must have a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Material Physics, Computational Mechanics or Civil Engineering (with a focus on mechanics). Basic knowledge in solid mechanics, computational modeling and materials is required and a specialization in solids and structures, solid mechanics and/or composite materials is an asset. Previous experience with experimental mechanics is a plus, though not a requirement.  

The candidate should be highly motivated for doing scientific research and should have well developed analytical and problem solving skills as well as an interest and curiosity for different types of computational and advanced experimental methods.

Application

The application must include following documents: