Title

Validation of the Austroads quasi nonlinear sublayering approach for the design of flexible pavements

Authors

Authors

M. Saleh; V. Dixit;E. Radwan

Abbreviated Journal Title

Road Transp. Res.

Keywords

Transportation

Abstract

It is well known that unbound coarse granular materials and fine-grained subgrade materials behave nonlinearly under the traffic loading. However, in mechanistic pavement design, it is common practice to model the coarse and fine-grained materials as linear elastic materials, so that a simple set of parameters, in this case the elastic modulus and the Poisson ratio, can be used to represent each layer. The Australian mechanistic empirical design method (Austroads) uses a simplified approach to account for the nonlinear behaviour of the unbound coarse and fine-grained materials. In this paper, the Austroads quasi-nonlinear analysis is compared with the nonlinear analysis to examine the validity of this approach. The base-course materials and subgrade soils were modelled as isotropic and as cross anisotropic to examine the effect of this factor on the validity of the results. The Austroads quasi-nonlinear analysis provided better Solutions than the linear elastic analysis without sublayering; however, it needs some adjustment to provide better match with the nonlinear analysis Solution and, ultimately, with the actually measured values.

Journal Title

Road & Transport Research

Volume

18

Issue/Number

2

Publication Date

1-1-2009

Document Type

Article

Language

English

First Page

27

Last Page

38

WOS Identifier

WOS:000270050800003

ISSN

1037-5783

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