Resilient modulus of some Victorian fine-grained soils at OMC, wet-of-OMC and soaked conditions

A typical flexible pavement structure consists of an asphalt wearing course and the underlying base and sub-base courses. The subgrade soil is the foundation of the pavement. In recent years, the resilient modulus has been recommended by pavement design guides as an important indicator for characterising the resilient behaviour of these pavement materials under dynamic traffic loading. The resilient modulus can be obtained from the repeated-load triaxial test in the laboratory. This paper reports and discusses some of the results from a study on the evaluation of the resilient modulus for eight Victorian fine-grained soils at different moisture contents and stress levels. The effects of the deviator stress, confining stress, moisture content and plasticity index of soils on the resilient modulus have been investigated, and a relationship has been established and discussed for the soils used in this study.