Fatigue cracking is one of the main distress modes of highway asphalt pavements. In laboratory fatigue tests, haversine or sinusoidal loading waves are commonly applied to characterize the fatigue performance of asphalt mixture samples. The strain wave in field asphalt layer under a moving axle load, however, is noticeably different from the haversine or sinusoidal wave. This research compared the fatigue behaviours of compacted asphalt mixture samples under actual strain waves and the commonly used haversine wave. Two types of actual strain waves induced by the single axle and tandem axle of vehicles were included for analysis. It is found that the fatigue lives of asphalt mixture samples subjected to the single-axle wave are obviously higher than those subjected to haversine wave, while the tandem–axle wave leads to the lowest fatigue life. The changing rates of stiffness, phase angle, and dissipated energy with loading cycles for the mixture samples under single-axle wave are all the lowest, while those under tandem-axle wave are all the highest. This helps explain the discrepancies in the samples’ fatigue lives under different loading waves. The above findings suggest that it is necessary to test asphalt mixture samples using loading waves that simulate the actual ones in the field (i.e., single-axle wave and tandem-axle wave) to improve the reliability of fatigue life prediction of asphalt pavements. In addition, this research reveals that three dissipated-energy-based indicators, namely initial dissipated energy, cumulative dissipated energy and plateau value, all generate a unique relationship with the sample’s fatigue life. The relationship is independent of loading wave type and strain level.

疲劳开裂是公路沥青路面的主要破坏模式之一。在实验室疲劳试验中，正弦或正弦载荷波通常用于表征沥青混合料样品的疲劳性能。然而，在移动轴载下，田间沥青层中的应变波与正弦波或正弦波明显不同。本研究比较了压实沥青混合料试样在实际应变波和常用正弦波作用下的疲劳行为。包括由车辆的单轴和串联轴引起的两种实际应变波进行分析。发现单轴波作用下沥青混合料试样的疲劳寿命明显高于正弦波作用下的沥青混合料试样，而串联轴波作用下的疲劳寿命最低。单轴波下混合试样的刚度、相角和耗散能量随加载周期的变化率均最低，而串联轴波下的均值最高。这有助于解释不同载荷波下样品疲劳寿命的差异。上述研究结果表明，有必要使用模拟现场实际加载波（即单轴波和串联轴波）对沥青混合料样品进行测试，以提高沥青路面疲劳寿命预测的可靠性。此外，本研究还揭示了三个基于耗散能的指标，即初始耗散能、累积耗散能和平台值，都与样品的疲劳寿命产生独特的关系。