Mechanical Characterization of Fine-Grained Lateritic Soils for Mechanistic-Empirical Flexible Pavement Design

Abstract

Fine-grained lateritic soils, which are typically found in tropical regions and have been used successfully in low-cost pavements, are often considered inadequate for the base and subbase pavement layers when the material selection is based on the California bearing ratio (CBR). When analyzed in repeated load triaxial (RLT) test equipment, which is the most frequently used device to analyze the mechanical behavior of unbound pavement materials, fine-grained lateritic soils exhibit low levels of plastic deformation. Thus, to allow more appropriate analyses of the mechanical behavior of such soils compared to traditional CBR-based analyses, resilient modulus and permanent deformation tests using RLT test equipment were performed. Then, multifactorial regression analysis of the experimental results was performed to identify the parameters of the material models that are implemented in the Brazilian mechanistic-empirical pavement design software program, MEDINA. The experimental program included material characterization in accordance with the so-called miniature, compacted, tropical (MCT) methodology that is tailored specifically to classify tropical soils. For one of the lateritic soils, two key parameters, i.e., the stress level and compaction moisture content, were varied in the RLT permanent deformation tests. An additional numerical analysis using MEDINA was conducted to evaluate the structural characteristics of flexible pavements composed of the four lateritic soils analyzed in this study. In general, the results obtained from this study indicate that lateritic soils can potentially be used as base and subbase layers in flexible pavement structures.