Long-Term Monitoring Operation of the Test-Road in Korea Highway Corporation(KHC)

Abstract

This paper presents the monitoring system installed in a test-road built in 2002 to establish and develop pavement techniques and performances in Korea. The test-road, located 1 km far away from Yeoju IC in the central part of the peninsula, is a two-lane road of 7.7 km constituted by both concrete and asphalt pavements designed with 25 and 33 different sections, respectively. A total of 1,900 sensors of 11 types including strain gauges, soil pressure gauges and thermocouples were embedded in pavement sections to investigate their behavioral characteristics under environmental and traffic loadings. Both manual and automatic monitoring systems were installed. The automatic monitoring system stores and transmits regularly measured data to the server. The manual monitoring system is composed by a system storing temperature and water content data measured in the pavement sections and, a system constituted by a weigh-in-motion system, which provides information on the traffic crossing the test-road, and an automatic weather observation station. The manual monitoring system connects directly sensors embedded in the testroad to the data loggers installed on field so that users can easily acquire desired data obtained by experiments or field tests. Static and dynamic load tests as well as FWD impact load tests were performed for concrete pavement, and dynamic load and FWD impact load tests for asphalt pavement. Visual inspections were also carried out to investigate damages of pavement sections or unusual features. These automatic and manual monitoring systems will provide numerous and necessary information for researches on road pavement including the establishment of pavement design.