ABSTRACT
Excessive rutting, resulting from a cumulative vertical deformation due to repeated traffic loads, is often the main cause of failure of flexible pavements. The analytical approach, however, that is currently used to design for the flexible pavement life is based on the critical elastic strain at the top of the subgrade and does not consider any plastic pavement behavior. An analysis for variable repeated loading in the context of material plasticity obviously provides a more rational design criterion. Such a criterion may be provided by shakedown analysis which guarantees the long term stability of a structure under repeated loads. In this work, a step by step finite element numerical procedure is used to estimate the response of the soil half-space when subjected to loadings of different intensities. The material is assumed to follow an associated flow rule obeying a Mohr-Coulomb yield criterion. Besides examining various convergence issues of the numerical procedure, results show that friction angle and cohesion greatly influences the shakedown load.
