Recent progress on lower-bound shakedown analysis of road pavements

Shakedown theory has been recognised as a more rational basis for structural design of flexible road pavements. A lower-bound shakedown approach, which aims to find the maximum design load of a pavement structure, was developed by the University of Nottingham, that forms part of efforts among other researchers' in applying shakedown theory in pavement designs. The lower-bound shakedown solutions were consistent with existing shakedown solutions assuming that the materials are isotropic and homogeneous following an associated plastic flow rule. Recently, this lower-bound approach was further developed to consider more realistic cases. Both two-dimensional and three-dimensional shakedown analyses were carried out taking into account cross-anisotropic or heterogeneous materials, the properties of which were programmed into a finite element software ABAQUS. For pavement materials obeying a non-associated flow rule, the corresponding two-dimensional lower-bound shakedown limits were also estimated by extending the lower-bound shakedown approach. A numerical step-by-step approach was also applied to address the non-associated problems and obtained similar results. Through these studies, influences of the original assumptions on the shakedown-based pavement designs can be assessed.