Accurate knowledge of pavement layer thicknesses and material properties is important to pavement management. Often this information is unknown or records are inaccurate, inaccessible, or out of date.The traditional method for obtaining pavement layer data is core sampling, which is time-consuming, labou-intensive, and intrusive to traffic; it also provides information only at the core location. The capability of ground-penetrating radar to provide accurate and continuous pavement layer thickness and property information has been investigated. Four Texas Strategic Highway Research Program asphalt pavement test sites were tested with radar. The radar data were analysed automatically using software that operated directly on the raw radar waveforms and produced numerical layer thickness profiles. The resulting predictions were correlated with direct in situ measurements and core and material samples. The results of this project have shown that ground-penetrating radar data, when properly analysed, can provide highly accurate measurements of pavement layer properties for project- and network-level applications. (A)
Abstract