Monitoring trends in road surface impact on rolling noise emissions

Abstract

Road surfaces degrade over time due to heavy traffic and weather conditions, which negatively influences both driving comfort and acoustic properties. In addition, the lifetime of a road surface can be increased by performing cost-effective incremental maintenance and this maintenance becomes more expensive when the damages are more severe (cracks, potholes). Current methods such as CPX are performed in a standardized way (using designated equipment and tightly controlled measurement conditions), however budget constraints limit frequent monitoring of surfaces. Therefore, continuous monitoring using ordinary passenger vehicles could be helpful to observe trends in rolling noise emissions and road evenness. Hence, we deployed designated sensor boxes in a number of vehicles that are on the road for other purposes. In addition, advances in calibration of different devices using de-noising autoencoders alleviate the effect of various measurement conditions such as driving speed, braking, accelerating, and temperature. As our innovative methodology has now been on the road for several years, trend analysis becomes possible.