Main Roads Western Australia's experience in the use of the falling weight deflectometer for network pavement strength assessment.

In the past Main Roads Western Australia (MRWA) has used road roughness as the main measure of pavement condition, and roughness data was collected biennially on the road network as part of the pavement asset management process. Other factors such as pavement strength, rutting, cracking, texture and skid resistance were generally not measured at the network level. Although it has always been recognised that the structural condition of a pavement has a major effect on other attributes including rutting, cracking and roughness, strength data was not previously determined because of the high costs involved with Benkelman Beam deflection testing, and because of the size of the Western Australian road network. Recently, MRWA has started to collect strength data by utilising the cheaper and quicker Falling Weight Deflectometer for the survey of network pavement strength. This paper presents a summary of MRWA's experience in the use of the Falling Weight Deflectometer for pavement strength survey at the network level. The paper also discusses the possibility of the application of Falling Weight Deflectometer deflection data in place of Benkelman Beam data for pavement rehabilitation design at the project level. (a)