Dynamic Strain Response of Hot-Recycled Asphalt Pavement under Dual-Axle Accelerated Loading Conditions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present stress results in a pavement under the passage of an axle under a traffic simulator.
Although the results are interesting from a mechanical point of view of pavement structures and useful to feed future numerical models,
the paper lacks a scientific explanation on possible relaxation or viscoelasticity effects (untreated) and contains several errors:

1) In all the document, it will be more coherent to put the distances in meters (for example line 126, centimeters ? or line 153, millimeters ?)

2) Replace all the "KN" by "kN"

3) Figure 1 : it would be interesting to present a diagram of the axle system

4) 0.002°C, is this the real precision of the thermocouple or the resolution of the digital thermometer? I have never seen a thermocouple probe with such fine precision.

5) line 167 : replace "km-h" by "km.h" or km "per hour"

6) In table 2, what do numbers 11# and 31# correspond to? It would be more understandable to put their position.

7) line 193 : replace "Axes" by "Axles"

8) In all figures, put the units, as exemple: µm/m for strain

9) For the figure 3, I think it would be judicious to precise temperature gradient.The conclusion of figure 3 deserves a mechanical interpretation
under the effects of tension / compression, relaxation time ? , viscoelasticity ?, ...

10) line 212-214 : please precise unit.

11) Figure 4 : The generated surface is in general not really a disc with uniformly distributed pressure.
Is this a sufficiently precise method to estimate the pressure under the tire?

12) Table 4 : What is the tire pressure ?

13 ) Figure 5 : It's not very clear, it might be necessary to enlarge the figure.

14) Check formula (1), it seems to me that T and G are reversed

15) line 292, I don't think it's the ultraviolet rays responsible for the accumulation of heat on the surface of the pavement but rather the infrared rays.

16) Figure 9 and 10 : To better compare the amplitude and the frequency, would it not be better to set the curves in relation to the start of the passage of the wheel?

17) Please check equation (4), equations are different in figure 11 and in the text.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your corrections to our manuscript, this is our reply letter after the article has been revised.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is well presented and contains original results. However, authors are encouraged to improve their work based on the following comments:

 

1) The novelty of this work must be more explained.

2) The abstract should be organized.

3) For general readers, author must discuss the possibility to use other kind of methods (DQM, FEM) based on the following works: [(a) “Size-dependent vibration response of porous graded nanostructure with FEM and nonlocal continuum model”; (b) "Dynamic stability/instability simulation of the rotary size-dependent functionally graded microsystem”; (c) “Non-polynomial framework for stress and strain response of the FG-GPLRC disk using three-dimensional refined higher-order theory"; (d) “Frequency simulation of viscoelastic multi-phase reinforced fully symmetric systems”; (e) “On the vibrations of the imperfect sandwich higher-order disk with a lactic core using generalize differential quadrature method”; (f) “Chaotic simulation of the multi-phase reinforced thermo-elastic disk using GDQM”].

 

4) Figs. 6 and 7 must be more discussed.

5) The conclusion should be revised, including the advantage of the presented technique.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your corrections to our manuscript, this is our reply letter after the article has been revised.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Replace "pavemen" by "pavement"

Author Response

We deeply admire your responsibility and conscientiousness in your work. This is a reply letter to you.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx