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A Comparison of Different Approaches in Numerical Modeling of Pavement Granular Material



Author(s)

Behzad Ghadimi, Hamid Nikraz and Colin Leek

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DOI:10.17265/1934-7359/2014.04.008

Department of Civil Engineering, Curtin University, Bentley 6845, Australia

Modeling pavement granular materials have played a significant role in pavement design procedure. Modeling can be through an experimental or numerical approach to predict the granular behavior during cyclic loading. Current design process in western Australia is based on linear elastic analysis of layers. The analysis is largely performed through a well-known program CIRCLY which is applied to model bound pavement material behavior. The KENLAYER is one of the common pavement software models used for pavement design in the United State which performs non-linear analysis for granular materials. Alternatively, a general finite element program such as ABAQUS can be used to model the complicated behavior of multilayer granular materials. This study is to compare results of numerical modeling with these three programs on a sample constructed pavement model. Moreover, a parametric study on the effects of Poisson ratio over the surface deflection of the flexible pavement has been conducted. It is found that increase in Poisson ratio of asphalt layer will increase the surface deflection while the increase in Poisson ratio of granular layers decreases the surface deflection.

Flexible pavement, numerical analysis, ABAQUS, CIRCLY, KENLAYER.