Moisture Sensitivity of Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) Mixtures in Nebraska - Phase II
As a consequential effort to the previous NDOR research project (P-564) on moisture damage, this report presents outcomes from this project incorporated with the previous project. Performance changes and fundamental material characteristics associated with moisture damage due to various anti-stripping additives in asphalt mixtures are studied through various experimental approaches and a numerical simulation. Three additives (i.e., one reference additive, hydrated lime, and two alternative additives: fly ash and cement) are investigated by adding them into two types of mixes (SP2 for low-traffic-volume roadways and SP5 for high-traffic- volume roadways) where two different asphalt binders (PG 64-22 for the SP2 mix and PG 70-28 for the SP5) are used. Two asphalt concrete mixture scale performance tests, the AASHTO T-283 and the APA under water, and two local-scale mixture constituent tests, the boiling water test (ASTM D 3625) and the pull-off test, are conducted to characterize the effects of binder-specific anti-stripping additives on the binder-aggregate bonding potential in mixtures. The pull-off tensile strength tests are then numerically modeled through the finite element technique incorporated with the cohesive zone modeling approach to seek more fundamental scientific insights into the effect of each anti-stripping additive on the overall moisture damage resistance. Results from laboratory tests and numerical simulations indicate that the SP5 mixtures, where high-quality aggregates and polymer-modified binder are used, are fairly self-resistant to moisture damage without treating any anti-stripping additive and do not show any visible sensitivity among additives, whereas the effects of additives and their sensitivity are significant in the SP2 mixes that use the unmodified binder PG 64-22 and low-quality aggregates. With the limited amount of test data, hydrated lime seems to perform slightly better than other additives, particularly with longer moisture-conditioning time. Fly ash contributes to reducing moisture damage by improving binder-aggregate interfacial properties, which are validated from the integrated experimental-computational evaluation.
Ultrasonic Pulse Wave Velocity Test as a Tool for Monitoring Changes in HMA Mixture Integrity due to Exposure to Moisture
Ultrasonic Pulse Wave Velocity Test as a Tool for Monitoring Changes in HMA Mixture Integrity due to Exposure to Moisture
L1 Adaptive Controller for Attitude Control of Multirotors
In this work we show an application of L1 Adaptive control theory for attitude control of UAVs. We implement the flight control system on a multirotor to show robustness and precise attitude tracking in the presence of modeling uncertainties and environmental disturbances. We choose backstepping control architecture, since the kinematics and dynamics of multirotors in most cases can be written in strict feedback form. We further exploit the fact that the kinematics of the plant, while free of uncertainties, is nonlinear, which makes it highly suitable for dynamic inversion control at each level of backstepping. On the other hand, plant dynamics is uncertain and is affected by environmental disturbances such as wind gusts, unmodeled dynamics etc. Therefore, we consider 3 variants of the control architecture. The first method uses backstepping to determine the moment demand and augments it with the L1 adaptive controller to account for uncertainties and provide robustness with guaranteed transient performance. The second architecture apply the concept of L1 adaptive backstepping to the same problem; and the third architecture uses L1 backstepping for quaternion representation of the system dynamics, which helps to avoid the singularities associated with Euler angles.