Effect of Soil Parameters on Elastic Characteristics of Subgrade Materials
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 24, Issue 4
Abstract
In this paper, state-dependent elastic characteristics of granular subgrade materials were investigated, assuming various field conditions. For this purpose, a series of resonant column tests were conducted. The test materials were cohesionless soils consisting of clean and silty sands with different fines contents. The effects of moisture content, overconsolidation ratio, relative density, and confining stress on the elastic modulus were analyzed. From the test results, it was observed that the initial shear modulus, , decreases with increasing moisture content because of reduced particle contact friction. Higher fines content produced a more pronounced modulus reduction at the same moisture content. It was also found that the effect of fines content on becomes smaller as the relative density and confining stress increase. These results indicate that the moisture effect on is important at shallow depths such as subgrade layers. A modulus reduction factor was proposed, which can reflect the effect of the soil parameters on elastic modulus. A resilient modulus () model modified on the basis of the test results was proposed and finite-element analyses were conducted. Two case examples were selected from the literature to verify the proposed model. Predicted values obtained using the proposed model showed reasonable agreement with measured values from the selected case examples.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MEST) (No. 2011-0030845).
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Information
Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 24 • Issue 4 • April 2012
Pages: 409 - 417
Copyright
© 2012. American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 7, 2011
Accepted: Sep 14, 2011
Published online: Sep 16, 2011
Published in print: Apr 1, 2012
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