The emergence of analytically-based pavement design has encouraged investigations toward a better understanding of the behaviour of pavement layers under cyclic loading. Unbound granular base (UGB) materials are commonly placed as base course layers in the design of pavement foundations. Due to their nature and geometry they are unsaturated geo-materials and therefore, it is desirable to study their behaviour using the framework of unsaturated soil mechanics. Current literature reflects very limited achievements in this direction. This thesis presents the development of a cyclic triaxial testing system and associated testing methodology that meets the challenges of testing an UGB material as an unsaturated soil. The testing system enables the initialisation of a specimen to target matric suction and facilitates direct measurement of its evolution under cyclic loading. In conjunction with the use of accurate on-specimens strain measurement transducers, ???clean??? strain and matric suction cyclic responses are obtained. Two types of cyclic triaxial testing are investigated: with constant cell pressure (i.e., CSeries testing) and with varying (cyclic) cell pressure where both axial and radial stress components are simultaneously (and in phase) pulsed (i.e., V-Series testing). Different initial matric suctions, si will be imposed in the testing program and the influence of si on material behaviour is analysed. This is investigated in a similar manner for C- and V-Series testing. The influence of si appears to be significant for both cyclic and permanent strain responses. A strong stress path dependency is found to characterise the behaviour of the UGB material. Under a wide range of cyclic deviator stress magnitudes, permanent strain response is found to correlate with that of matric suction response. Both appear to indicate better the relative performance of a UGB material than the response of resilient modulus. Another particular aspect investigated is the influence of additional fines on the behaviour of the UGB material. To ???isolate??? the effects of additional fines the cyclic and permanent strain responses of ???equivalent??? specimens with equivalent compaction and unsaturation condition, but different fines content, are compared. The results showed that the relative performance of the two materials (distinguished by the different percentage of fines content) in intertwined with the strong stress path dependency. It is also found that a material compacted at higher dry density may not improve its behaviour under cyclic loading, but may worsen with load cycles. Soil-water characteristic curve tests are conducted for the UGB materials investigated, showing high sensitivity of initial matric suction to moisture content, which increases further for the material with additional fines. This explains the notion of ???sensitivity??? of UGB materials as commonly suggested by practicing pavement engineers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258735 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Craciun, Ovidiu, Engineering & Information Technology, Australian Defence Force Academy, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales - Australian Defence Force Academy. Engineering & Information Technology |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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