ABSTRACT
To ensure accurate assessment for pavement design, sufficient knowledge of the mechanical properties of the materials used in road construction is needed. For base layer materials a linear elastic approach is commonly utilized for simplicity purposes to describe pavement response under loading cycles. However, this assumption may lead to an incorrect prediction of expected responses in the pavement leading to improper design. The increases in computational approaches including Finite Element Modeling (FEM) have lead to more a robust ability to more closely take into account the actual mechanical behavior of the pavement materials. These tools in return are utilized in inconsistent manners with corresponding discrepancies in predicted responses. The present study investigates, the nonlinear elastic behavior of the unbound materials used in the base course, through with FEM under a variety of scenarios to investigate the influence of various impacts of initial conditions on predicted responses with the pavement structure.
