Multiscale analyse of the relation between skid resistance and pavements surfaces texture evolution with polishing

Abstract

It is known from the literature that skid resistance is closely related to road surface roughness. This paper aims to develop a multiscale texture decomposition method able to identify the relevant scales that affect pavement surfaces’ skid resistance variation during polishing. This method is based on continuous wavelets decomposition and. It is applied on seven pavement surfaces before and after polishing. The polishing is done in the laboratory using the Wehner & Schulze apparatus, which also serves for skid esistance measurements. At each step of polishing, 3D topographical maps of the test surface are realised with an optical sensor. On these maps, multiscale texture parameters are calculated after the multiscale decomposition. Analysis of these parameters shows their ability to represent the increase and the rate of increase in skid resistance in early age (increase in multiscale parameters for scale range 300–3000 µm) of pavement surfaces and the long-time skid resistance decrease (decrease in multiscale parameters for scale range 0–1000 µm.