Enhancing pavement performance prediction with traffic speed deflection data

ABSTRACT

Pavement performance modelling is an essential part of pavement management. Past research has shown that a structural indicator can be included in pavement performance models to capture differences in performance between weak and strong pavements. Weak pavements are expected to deteriorate more rapidly than strong pavements, as consistently shown in past research. The work presented in this paper uses the Traffic Speed Deflectometer (TSD) to calculate multiple structural indexes and compares their ability to differentiate between poor and well performing pavements. Historical condition data from the US National Parks pavement network is used in this assessment. Two approaches for calculating the subgrade resilient modulus and two approaches for calculating the effective structural number from the TSD results are compared. The temperature corrected centre deflection, surface curvature index and ratio of effective to required structural number are all calculated from the TSD data. Performance models are developed for two condition indexes and the International Roughness Index (IRI). In all cases, the addition of the structural indexes improved the quality of predictions, and the IRI prediction showed the most improvement from including the indexes. Ultimately, it was shown that the TSD testing results can be used to inform the pavement management process.

KEYWORDS:

• Pavement performance modelling
• traffic speed deflection
• pavement structural indexes

Acknowledgements

Specifically, thanks to Mohammed Elias and Anthony Maloche of FHWA Eastern Federal Lands, Thomas Canick of the NPS and Nadarajah Sivaneswaran of FHWA Turner Fairbank’s Highway Research Centre.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author would like to acknowledge the support, in terms of providing data, information and feedback, of the US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the US National Park Service (NPS).