Fatigue cracking is a common form of flexible pavement distress, which generally starts and spreads through bitumen. To address this issue, self-healing elastomer (SHE) modified bitumens were elaborated to assess whether these novel materials can overcome the neat asphalt (NA) fatigue performance and whether the current failure definition, failure criterion, and fatigue-restoration criteria can fit their performance. All bitumens were subjected to short-term and long-term aging. Linear amplitude sweep (LAS) test, LAS with rest period (LASH), and simplified viscoelastic-continuum-damage (S-VECD) model were utilized to appraise the behavior of the mentioned bitumens. The results showed that maximum stored pseudo-strain energy (PSE) and tau (τ) × N (number of loading cycles) failure definitions exhibited high efficiency to accommodate the fatigue life of NA and SHE-modified bitumens. Both failure criteria identified that SHE-modified bitumen (containing 1% of SHE) showed the highest increment of fatigue performance (67.1%) concerning NA. The failure criterion based on total released PSE, in terms of the area under the released PSE curve, was the only failure concept with high efficiency (R2 up to 0.999) to predict asphalt binder fatigue life. As well, the current framework to evaluate bitumen self-restoration failed to fully accommodate asphalt binder behavior, because bitumen with higher restoration could not exhibit greater fatigue performance. Consequently, a new procedure to assess this property including fatigue behavior was proposed, showing consistent results, and confirming that SHE-modified bitumen (containing 1% of SHE) exhibited the highest increment of fatigue performance (154.02%) after application of the rest period. Hence, the optimum SHE content in NA was 1%. Furthermore, it was found that a greater number of loading cycles to failure (Nf) did not ensure better fatigue performance and stored PSE influenced the bitumen fatigue behavior.
Keywords: bitumen fatigue failure; bitumen fatigue performance; failure criterion; failure definition; self-healing; self-restoration.