Pavement texture from high-speed laser for pavement management system

Abstract

The locked-wheel skid trailer (ASTM E274) is commonly used to estimate the skid resistance of pavements in the United States. However, this method is very expensive and disturbs the traffic flows during the test. Hence, a correlation was developed between skid resistance or skid number (SN40R) values obtained using skid tester and the texture data or mean profile depth (MPD), collected using a vehicle-mounted laser operating at highway speeds from nine highway test sections. This paper describes two field tests performed to validate the above-mentioned Skid Resistance versus MPD correlation and to also develop a rapid screening methodology for skid resistance of a network of pavements. In addition to the locked-wheel skid trailer and vehicle-mounted laser, several other tests such as the Dynamic Friction Test (DFT), circular texture meter (CTM) and sand patch tests were also performed. The MPD values obtained from the vehicle-mounted laser operating at highway speeds and cumulative daily traffic volumes for each pavement were used to estimate the equivalent SN40R values. The measured and estimated SN40R values compared well with a maximum variance of less than 5. The proposed screening methodology to estimate skid numbers from measured texture data was embedded into computer code and was incorporated into the Pavement Management System for rapid screening of skid resistance.