Recent Advances in Pavement Soil Mechanics

Geoscience seminar with speaker Professor Hai-Sui Yu FREng - Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Leeds.

Abstract

Road pavement analysis is a very challenging problem in soil mechanics and foundation engineering. This is due to the fact that pavements are subject to moving and variable traffic loads. Pavement materials are elastic-plastic in nature and therefore their behaviour and analysis are also complicated. The conventional pavement design methods have been largely based on simple elastic analysis combined with empirical correlations.  A main limitation of this traditional elastic approach is that the strength properties of pavement materials are not taken into consideration.

This lecture presents a new elastic-plastic approach to pavement analysis and design based on shakedown theory of plasticity. In this novel shakedown approach to pavement analysis and design, the elastic-plastic behaviour of pavement materials is properly considered. The moving and variable traffic loads are also addressed in a rigorous manner.