Study on the forest road pavements reinforced with geogrids by using the 2D FEM method

The forest road pavements ensure the transportation of wood from the primary platform to the public road. The traffic has seen a rapid development in terms of transportation capacity. Thus, the forest road pavements are subjected to increasing traffic pressures. To respond, the researchers come up with the optimisation of the road pavement by using geogrids. The main purpose of this study is to present the behaviour of forest pavements reinforced with geogrids under the traffic load. The calculation of the stress–strain state was performed by using the finite element method. Therefore, within its first part, the paper presents the results similarity for the calculation of forest road pavements by using softwares such as Calderom 2000, ANSYS and Rubicon ToolBox. The second part approaches the consolidation of road pavements with geogrids to reduce the elastic vertical deformations of pavements. Findings of this study revealed that the 2D FEM method and ANSYS software offer similar results when compared to classical software. The geogrids located at various heights of the pavement produced different vertical elastic deformations and the increase of their modulus of elasticity did not seem to be cost-effective. However, when doubled, the average elastic deformation was found of about 2.49%.