Abstract: Particle breakage can occurs within railway ballast under relatively lower confining pressure, resulting in a change in the particle gradation. Gradation significantly influences the physical and mechanical characteristics of ballast. There is an increasingly urgent need for constitutive modeling of ballast for the prediction of gradation evolution under loading conditions. Based on the triaxial test results of ballast, a boundary surface model for ballast under relatively lower confining pressure is developed by employing the fractal breakage index defined by Einav and the theory of boundary surface plasticity. By the comparisons of experimental results, it is shown that the proposed model can well indicate the stress-strain behavior of coarse aggregate under low confining pressure, and provides a reliable prediction of gradation evolution caused by particle breakage during loading.

Key words: ballast, particle breakage, gradation, bounding surface, constitutive model