Condition assessment of rigid pavement using terrestrial laser scanner observations

Abstract

ABSTRACT The main task of this study is to introduce an applied methodology using terrestrial laser scanner for facilitating the process of detecting, measuring defects and evaluating the condition assessment of rigid pavement instead of traditional visual inspection methods which cause waste of time, high cost and work to disrupt traffic. Terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) was used to create a three-dimensional model for rigid pavement of Gas station in Kafr El-sheikh city in Egypt to evaluate the condition assessment and defect detecting. The evaluation was carried out on rigid pavement slabs with different distress types such as transverse cracking, joint spalling, polished aggregate, blow up, punch out failures, and surface defects. Pavement distresses were identified in terms of defected area, crack width, and intensity. Geometric properties of each rigid pavements slabs are also determined from terrestrial laser scanner observations such as dimensions, settlement of each rigid slab using plane equation technique, rotation and tilting angles for each slab. MAGNET COLLAGE software program was applied to process TLS data and surface cracks measuring. Designed MATLAB software program are also created to fit TLS observations to plane equations. Based on the results, it is deduced that the distortion of rigid slabs ranged from 10 to 46 mm as maximum values and from 1 to 5 mm as minimum values, the angles of the rotation of studied rigid pavement slabs ranged from 0° to 2.3° but the angles of tilting of studied rigid pavement slabs are ranged from −1.6° to 1.9°. The revealed defects in the studied Gas station using terrestrial laser scanner observations provide a significant improvement for detecting rigid pavements characteristics and distresses.