Study of coarse-grained soils design characteristics

The article presents the results of deformation characteristic studies for soils containing various amounts of rock clastic material during its use as a working layer of the subgrade and the foundations of pavements. The studies were performed on coarse soil models using the geotechnical software package Plaxis, which avoided the cumbersome and laborious laboratory tests of soil mixtures. Also, to compare the obtained results of numerical modeling, an analytical analysis of coarse soil deformation conditions was performed. They presented the graphical representation of the relative strain and the deformation modulus of soils belonging to large-clastic varieties, as well as the pattern of their change depending on the percentage of fragments larger than 2 mm. Thus, it was first established that the dependence of the relative vertical deformations of soils on the quantitative content of the coarse fractions in them is strictly linear. However, as for its deformation modulus, the same dependence is no longer linear, but parabolic. The obtained patterns are confirmed by analytical calculations and processing of previously performed studies on physical models. They proposed the methods to refine the calculated characteristics of coarse soil with a varying amount of rock fragments for pavement calculation.