Cyclic plasticity based model for flexible pavements

摘要

Rutting is one of the main causes of damage in low traffic flexible pavements and recent studies, dealing with the improvement of design methods for flexible pavements, have pointed out the key role played by permanent deformations in the unbound granular layers. In spite of this, adequate methods for predicting permanent deformations in unbound pavement materials are lacking. The purpose of this paper is to show that the monotonic and cyclic mechanical behaviour of unbound granular materials for roads can be modelled within the framework of soils plasticity. The incremental method is a step by step calculation based on an elastoplastic model, and a simplified method is developed for finite element (2D and 3D) modelling of flexible pavements.