Development of a subgrade failure criteria using accelerated pavement testing.

Current subgrade failure criteria are limited and the one most used in mechanistic pavement design is based on test data collected from the AASHO Road Tests in the late fifties. The strain criterion was based on a single subgrade soil (CL), on theoretical strains calculated on top of the subgrade, and was based on the subgrade modulus estimated from the California Bearing Ratio. With the advent of the new AASHTO mechanistic design guide, it is important to quantify the impact of soil type and moisture content on the subgrade failure criterion. Accelerated pavement testing was conducted on full-scale test sections. The test sections consisted of several subgrade types, of which one was a SM soil. (Author/publisher) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E208431.