To model the resilient behaviour of pavements, the French pavement laboratory, LCPC, has developed a finite element program called CVCR, which is a part of the finite element code CESAR-LCPC (Heck et al., 1998; Heck, 2001a, b). This program allows the modelling of the response of pavements in 3D, under moving wheel loads, and incorporates the following material models:
• Linear elasticity
• The Huet-Sayegh visco-elastic model for bituminous materials.
• Two non-linear elastic models for unbound granular materials: the Boyce model, modified to take into account anisotropy (Hornych et al., 1998) and the well known k-0 model (Hicks & Monismith, 1971). These models have been described in Chapter 9, Section 9.4.1.
The example below (Hornych et al., 2002) presents an application of CVCR to the modelling of a low traffic pavement with a granular base, tested on the LCPC pavement test track. In this study, the objective was, in particular, to evaluate the ability of the model to simulate experimental pavement response for different load levels and different water contents of the unbound granular material.
