Influence of Material Properties on Tire/Road Noise for Non-destructive Pavement Condition Assessment

Abstract

With the purpose of using tire/road noise for pavement condition assessment as a non-destructive test method, an investigation on the influence of pavement material characteristics on tire/road noise is conducted. The acoustic data is collected by a directional microphone mounted behind the rear tire on the passenger's side of a test vehicle, driving over different sections of pavements with different material properties. The tire/road noise under 2000 Hz is extracted to investigate how it is influenced by the pavement features, such as macrotexture, porosity, top-layer thickness, and top-layer stiffness. The macrotexture, which mainly reflects pavement friction, exhibits high relevance to the tire/road noise below 1000 Hz. The top-layer stiffness of pavement could be distinguished from the sound pressure level at peak frequency between 700 ∼ 1300 Hz, the larger stiffness coming with higher amplitude of sound pressure level (SPL) at peak frequency. The results show high potential to assess pavement friction by the tire/road noise starting from macrotexture measurement. Moreover, the consistency of paving quality or sudden change of pavement subsurface structure can be recognized by looking into the spectrum features at peak frequency area of tire/road noise.