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

    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

    Share

    COinS