Road Roughness and Whole Body Vibration: Evaluation Tools and Comfort Limits

Abstract

An important element of achieving quality in a road network is the control of vehicle vibration due to pavement roughness and road irregularities. Scientific literature and international standards suggest that we evaluate these phenomena by measuring the whole body vibration (WBV) on the road user, but, for the practical aims of road engineering, this expression has to be related to road unevenness indexes, especially the most common one (the international roughness index, IRI). This index, in turn, is obtained from measured pavement geometric data using a conventional model of a mechanical system representing part of a vehicle. To better investigate the problem of user comfort, more complex models and analyses are needed. In this paper, a model of a real and common vehicle is presented and used, after a calibration process, to perform many dynamic simulations. The obtained results, in terms of weighted vertical acceleration (aWZ, that is, the WBV index, according to ISO standard), show good correlations (R2 from 0.75 to 0.93, depending on vehicle speed) with the IRI values of the examined road sections. On the basis of this correlation, authors propose threshold values for both vibration and roughness indexes; these thresholds could be used for road users' comfort evaluation and adopted in technical standards. © 2010 ASCE

Use of generated artificial road profiles in road roughness evaluation

“…DLI, instead, is based on the assessment of the loads induced by trucks on road pavement due to the presence of irregularities. In addition, the ride quality assessment, that is, the main topic of the ISO 2631 standard, was evaluated by simulations, calculating the whole-body vibration perceived by road users inside a vehicle riding on a roughness pavement, as described by Cantisani and Loprencipe [10].…”

Evaluation of the effect of deteriorating riding quality on bus-pavement interaction

“…ISO 2631 (1997) was applied to calculate the vertical acceleration (a wz ). The speed-related a wz thresholds proposed by Cantisani and Loprencipe (2010) were adopted for the analysis of the data (Table 4). The road roughness versus speed versus vertical acceleration was plotted on three-dimensional graphs to indicate the impact of speed on the vertical acceleration data.…”

“…The vertical accelerations were influenced by the road roughness, as well as by the speed of the vehicle. Cantisani and Loprencipe (2010) indicated that a section of surface failure will register a high road roughness, but depending on the speed the vehicle travels over that surface failure, the accelerations could be high and low. Therefore, Cantisani and Loprencipe (2010) indicated that if the vehicle speed was reduced, a higher level of roughness could be tolerated.…”

“…The road roughness categories used in this paper were developed from Sayers et al (1986) and Cantisani and Loprencipe (2010) ( Table 2). The categories from Cantisani and Loprencipe (2010) were combined into three, i.e.…”

Bridge Expansion Joint in Road Transition Curve: Effects Assessment on Heavy Vehicles

“…The profile analysis allows evaluating general ride characteristics referring to standards, comfort and safety [25] and choosing pavement sections where the warning values of the previous evaluation are reached and maintenance works needed [26][27][28][29].…”