Abstract
The paper gives an overview of a ground penetrating radar (GPR) experiment to survey debonding areas within pavement structure during accelerated pavement tests (APT) conducted on the university Gustave Eiffel’s fatigue carrousel. Thirteen artificial defect sections composed of three types of defects (Tack-free, Geotextile, and Sand-based) were embedded during the construction phase between the top and the base layers. The data were collected in two stages covering the entire life cycle of the pavement structure using four GPR systems: An air-coupled ultra-wideband GPR (SF-GPR), two wideband 2D ground coupled GPRs (a SIR-4000 with a 1.5 GHz antenna and a 2.6 GHz-StructureScan from GSSI manufacturer), and a wideband 3D GPR (from 3D-radar manufacturer). The first stage of the experiments took place in 2012–2013 and lasted up to 300 K loadings. During this stage, the pavement structure presented no clear degradation. The second stage of experiments was conducted in 2019 and continued until the pavement surface demonstrated a strong degradation, which was observed at 800 K loadings. At the end of the GPR experiments, several trenches were cut at various sections to get the ground truth of the pavement structure. Finally, the GPR data are processed using the conventional amplitude ratio test to study the evolution of the echoes coming from the debonded areas.
Highlights
Evaluation of road structures is of major importance to maintain their durability and extend their lifetime [1]
The results of research and experiments are gathered in several reports, dedicated to modeling and experimental tests performed on test and real sections by different non-destructive testing (NDT) including radar systems from three manufacturers [9,10]
Direct wave in the surveyed medium, and an increase of amplitude as the permittivity of the layer decreases. These results show an opposite tendency to the ones observed on the measurements of the 1.5 GHz Stepped-frequency array system (Figure 11)
Summary
Evaluation of road structures is of major importance to maintain their durability and extend their lifetime [1]. Early detection of delamination in asphalt pavement is a challenge for appropriate maintenance or rehabilitation strategy In this context, ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is part of efficient non-destructive testing (NDT) for the evaluation of road structures, for thicknesses estimation, and in particular for crack and debonding damages [4,5,6,7,8]. The results of research and experiments are gathered in several reports, dedicated to modeling and experimental tests performed on test and real sections by different NDT including radar systems from three manufacturers [9,10] Among their conclusions, confirming those from [4,5,6,7,8], they state that GPR can detect moderate to severe delamination as interpretation of coherent anomalies at specific depths. This is why results presented for defect I-13 will show a lack of values in the center of the data
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