Assessment of Pavement Structural Conditions Using Ground Penetrating Radar

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology has been widely applied in ground subsurface investigations. The major development of GPR for pavement assessment originated in the early 1980s and since has become a well-established investigation technique for pavements. Analysis of GPR data provides much richer information on layer depths of pavement structure, material conditions, moisture content, voids, and locations of reinforcement and other features. Being able to accurately and reliably assess the underlying conditions of pavements is essential to fully understand both functional and structural deficiencies or failures of pavements and associated causality. This improved understanding will lead to the most cost-effective maintenance and rehabilitation treatments and considerable savings in maintenance and rehabilitation expenditure. The overall goal of this research is to extend the GPR technology in combination with modern data analytics to provide improved pavement investigation capabilities. As a result, new methodologies and analytical procedures were developed to acquire and analyze field GPR data, and infer subgrade density, which is critical for diagnosis of pavement failure and underlying causality [1, 2]. Based on the outcomes of the research, the potential pavement foundation issues of critical state highways in Georgia, USA are presented.

Funding: The work presented in this paper is part of a research project (RP 19-21) sponsored by the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT). The contents of this paper reflect the views of the authors, who are solely responsible for the facts and accuracy of the data, opinions, and conclusions presented herein. The contents may not reflect the views of the funding agency or other individuals.

Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funding sponsors had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, and in the decision to publish the results.

References

1. Abdelmawla, A.M., Durham, S.A. and Kim, S. Estimation of Subgrade Soil Density Using Ground Penetrating Radar. In Proceedings of 2019 ICSC Conference, Seoul, Korea, July 2019

Abdelmawla, A. and S. Kim. Application of Ground Penetrating Radar to Estimate Subgrade Soil Density, Infrastructures, 5 (2), 12, 2020; https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures5020012