Sensor-based pavement diagnostic using acoustic signature for moduli estimation

Abstract

The diffusion of smart infrastructures for smart cities provides new opportunities for the improvement of both road infrastructure monitoring and maintenance management.Often pavement management is based on the periodic assessment of the elastic modulus of the bound layers (i.e., asphalt concrete layers) by means of traditional systems, such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD). Even if these methods are reliable, well-known, and widespread, they are quite complex, expensive, and are not able to provide updated information about the evolving structural health condition of the road pavement. Hence, more advanced, effective, and economical monitoring systems can be used to solve the problems mentioned above.Consequently, the main objective of the study presented in this paper is to present and apply an innovative solution that can be used to make smarter the road pavement monitoring. In more detail, an innovative Non-Destructive Test (NDT)-based sensing unit was used to gather the vibro-acoustic signatures of road pavements with different deterioration levels (e.g. with and without fatigue cracks) of an urban road. Meaningful features were extracted from the aforementioned acoustic signature and the correlation with the elastic modulus defined using GPR and FWD data was investigated.Results show that some of the features have a good correlation with the elastic moduli of the road section under investigation. Consequently, the innovative solution could be used to evaluate the variability of elastic modulus of the asphalt concrete layers, and to monitor with continuity the deterioration of road pavements under the traffic loads.

Integration of Smart Pavement Data with Decision Support Systems: A Systematic Review

“…Instead of using back-calculating techniques, some works investigated the possibility of estimating the elastic modulus by finding correlations between other characteristics of the pavement and the pavement modulus. Here, Cafiso et al [45] demonstrated that extracted features from the vibro-acoustic signature of the pavement can have a good correlation with the pavement's elastic modulus.…”

“…The self-powered wireless surface sensing approach made use of piezoelectric transducers to detect bottom-up cracking. Another work that explored a method for detection of cracks inside the pavement was developed by Fedele et al [42] and Cafiso et al [45], which resorted to microphones placed on the pavement surface to record its vibro-acoustic signature. Since the propagation of both vibration and sound is, among others, a function of the proprieties of the material, this method is based on the hypothesis that, in the presence of cracks, the stiffness of the pavement decreases, resulting in a reduction in the wave transmission capacity of the material.…”

“…Regarding the structural category, it was also divided into two distinct sub-categories related to the main focus of the systems under analysis. The works were divided into those that focused on the identification of fatigue cracking [42,43,46,48,50,53], most commonly bottom-up cracks, and the estimation of pavement layers' elastic modulus and the prediction of mechanical response [34,45,49,51,52,[54][55][56], which are intrinsically related.…”

Innovative smart road management systems in the urban context: Integrating smart sensors and miniaturized sensing systems

“…Indeed, based on previous studies, 45 a given variation of the features listed above can be associated with the presence of a crack or a defect of the road.…”

Technical Proposal for Monitoring Thermal and Mechanical Stresses of a Runway Pavement

“…In [ 36 ], horizontal strains are used to calculate the pavement moduli. Cafiso et al [ 37 ] used a pre-polarized, omnidirectional, acoustically isolated microphone to collect the vibro-acoustic signatures of road pavements and correlate them to the elastic moduli obtained from FWD. The proposed solution could be used to continuously monitor the downgrading of asphalt road pavements under traffic.…”