Characterization of granular materials for pavements

Abstract

For design and analysis of flexible pavements, a simple elastic model that does not require cumbersome calculation and also can rank materials according to their performance is clearly desirable. Early studies indicated that the resilient modulus of a granular material can be taken to be a function of the first invariant of stress, θ, although there is evidence that it is also dependent on the repeated deviator stress, q r . The limitations of some earlier models are discussed herein and a simple model for granular materials is proposed. The model is empirical in nature and based on repeated load triaxial testing with constant confining pressure. The application of this model in situations where the confining pressure is pulsed in phase with the deviator stress is also discussed. Key words: repeated load, triaxial test, resilient modulus, granular materials, modelling, pavement.