ANALYSIS OF RECYCLED ROAD PAVEMENTS BY NON-LINEAR FINITE ELEMENT

For the last six years or so, pavement recycling has been successfully used in Australia, as it has proved to cut the cost of maintaining the road network as well as using a minimum amount of new materials. The depth of recycling ranges from shallow lifting to depths of 200 to 300 mm down to deep lifting to depths of 600 to 700 mm. An important step in the design of recycled and flexible pavements is calculating the response of the pavement to a vehicular load. Such response has been characterised to be a non linear problem in continuous media. A large number of investigations during recent decades indicate that there are considerable disagreements between the conventional solutions of the theory of elasticity and the actual measurements of pavement responses. The reason for these disagreements appears to be caused by the simplifying but necessary assumptions of linearity in soil materials. Therefore, the effect of non linearity is of added interest in the procedure of pavement analysis and design. The inclusion of this important factor in the procedure of analysis demands an understanding of the materials' characteristics and their behaviour under moving loads. This paper attempts to tackle this problem. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see IRRD 895316.