Abstract:
About 80% of the total road network in India is under the rural roads category, and these roads usually carry low traffic volumes. These roads are generally built as granular pavements (with or without a thin bituminous surface) and are designed according to Indian Roads Congress guidelines for the design of rural roads, which do not include mechanistic principles. Considering the size of the rural road network in the country, rationalization of the design approach can result in the optimal use of resources. Gathering experience on the performance of pavements under different climatic and traffic conditions is crucial for developing rational pavement design approaches. Because granular material forms the main structural layers of these pavements, accurate modeling of the granular layers is essential for analysis of low-volume (rural) road pavements. Under application of a load, granular material behaves nonlinearly and shows stress hardening characteristics (i.e., the resilient modulus is stress dependent). In this study, an attempt has been made to develop a rational performance criterion for thin-surface low-volume roads by use of performance data collected from selected road sections in the eastern part of India and consideration of the nonlinearity of the granular layers in the mechanistic analysis of the pavements.
