Unified analysis of road pavement profiles for evaluation of surface characteristics

Abstract

The research deals with the measure and evaluation of the unevenness and texture of road pavements, by means of unified procedures both for surveys and processing of acquired data, with the aim to represent the surface characteristics as a spectrum in the domain of spatial frequencies (or wavelengths). The texture properties, in fact, can be referred to many aspects of pavements performances, so allowing to establish thresholds for the acceptability of new construction or to ensure good working conditions for existing road infrastructures. The advantages of the proposed unified procedures are that the measurements are taken with modern and advanced equipment, minimizing the impact on the normal road exercise; moreover, it is possible to propose an optimized area in the frequency vs. texture level graph, where the spectrum has to fall into, in order to balance some conflicting requirements. The boundaries of the area can be also referred to the specific characteristics of the examined infrastructures; if a spectrum fits into the area, an optimal behaviour of the surface is ensured, respect to the interaction phenomena between tires and pavement which are influenced by surface texture. The proposal was tested with a case study, in which thresholds of performance parameters and boundaries of the optimized area were decided onto the basis of correlations between road indexes and texture properties, coming from the scientific literature or proposed on the basis of empirical results.