Papers presented at this session include: temperature distributions in asphalt pavements (himeno, k, watanabe, t and maruyama, t); transient effects in low temperature induced failure and fracture initiation in a pavement structure (selvadurai, aps, phang, wa and au, mc); cold climate performance of canadian airport pavements (haas, r, lee, h and meyer, f); applications of a method for evaluation of low temperature tensile properties of asphalt concrete (anderson, ko and leung, sc); evaluation of bearing capacity of asphalt pavement with low-temperature transverse cracking (kasahara, a and yoshida, h); laboratory investigations of low temperature cracking susceptibility of asphalt concrete (janoo, vc and chamberlain, ej); results of laboratory tests on amir compacted asphalt slabs (abd el halim, ao, mshana, g and sithole, v). for the covering abstract of the conference see irrd 807037.

This report describes the thermal stress restrained specimen test (TSRST), which was selected to evaluate the low-temperature cracking resistance of asphalt concrete mixtures. The TSRST system includes a load frame, step-motor-driven load ram, data acquisition hardware and software, temperature controller, and specimen alignment stand. An experiment design that considered a range of mixture and test condition variables was developed to evaluate the suitability of TSRST for characterizing low-temperature cracking resistance of asphalt concrete mixtures. Four asphalts and two aggregates were selected for the experiment. The mixture variables included asphalt type, aggregate type, and air voids content; the test condition variables included specimen size, stress relaxation, aging, and cooling rate.