Directional Skid Resistance Characteristics of Road Pavement: Implications for Friction Measurements by British Pendulum Tester and Dynamic Friction Tester

Abstract

The British pendulum tester (BPT) and the dynamic friction tester (DFT) are commonly used to evaluate the polishing effect of traffic on pavement skid resistance. The present study was conducted to answer two questions: (i) whether the directional moving traffic action results in significant directional differences in skid resistance of the pavement, and (ii) if so, whether BPT and DFT are effective tools for evaluating the skid resistance performance of polished pavements with significant directional skid resistance characteristics. Five in-service pavement sections with different degrees of polishing were examined in this study. The following findings were obtained from the study: (a) There were statistically significant differences between the longitudinal and transverse skid resistance of the polished pavements tested; (b) there were no statistically significant differences between the longitudinal and transverse skid resistance of the newly paved unpolished pavement tested; (c) BPT was able to differentiate the directional skid resistance differences of the polished pavements tested; and (d) DFT was unable to differentiate the directional skid resistance differences of the polished pavements tested. DFT produces one skid resistance value for a circular path at each test point. The test results found that DFT over-estimated the traffic-direction skid resistance of in-service pavements. The over-estimation errors ranged from 0.001 to 0.023 DFT units, and the corresponding percent errors were from 0.4% to 11.1%. This finding suggests that the over-estimation effect of skid resistance directionality of polished pavements on DFT measurements should be recognized in pavement skid resistance evaluation and pavement safety studies.