ANALYSIS OF ROAD ROUGHNESS RECORDS BY POWER SPECTRAL DENSITY TECHNIQUES

DURING RECENT YEARS, THE ROUGHNESS CHARACTERISTICS OF A LARGE NUMBER OF AIRPORT RUNWAYS HAVE BEEN MEASURED. ROUGHNESS CONTENT WAS DEFINED BY THE POWER DENSITY FUNCTION, WHICH SHOWS THE CONTRIBUTION TO THE ROUGHNESS VARIANCE OF THE ROUGHNESS AT EACH WAVE LENGTH. THIS INVESTIGATION WAS CONDUCTED TO EXAMINE THE FEASIBILITY OF USING SIMILAR MATHEMATICAL TECHNIQUE TO DEFINE THE ROUGHNESS CONTENT OF HIGHWAY PAVEMENTS. THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL METHOD OF MEASURING PAVEMENT ROUGHNESS IS TO RECORD THE PAVEMENT ELEVATION AT SMALL INTERVALS RELATIVE TO AN ARBITRARY DATUM. THIS ELEVATION PROFILE CONSISTS OF TWO COMPONENTS' A/ A CHANGE IN ELEVATION DUE TO PAVEMENT ROUGHNESS. THE LARGE DEVIATIONS IN ELEVATION DUE TO PAVEMENT GEOMETRY TEND TO MASK THE INFORMATION ON ROUGHNESS CONTENT CONTAINED IN THE PROFILE. TO OVERCOME THIS, THE ELEVATION PROFILES MUST BE FILTERED SO THAT THE TRANSFORMED PROFILE CONTAINS THE INFORMATION ONLY ON ROUGHNESS. OF THREE FILTERING PROCEDURES EXAMINED, THE MOST FEASIBLE APPEARS TO BE THAT BASED ON THE SUBTRACTION OF THE MOVING AVERAGE. HOWEVER, THE FULL IMPLICATIONS OF THIS TYPE OF PROCEDURE ARE NOT CLEARLY UNDERSTOOD. THE TECHNIQUES EXAMINED IN THIS INVESTIGATION AND THE ASSOCIATED COMPUTER PROGRAMS PROVIDED A SYSTEMATIC FRAMEWORK FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE LONGITUDINAL ROUGHNESS CHARACTERISTICS OF HIGHWAY PAVEMENTS TO DETERMINE PAVEMENT SERVICEABILITY AND EVALUATE ROUGHNESS MEASURING DEVICES.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • Report No 101, 25 PP, 16 FIG, 15 REF, 4 APP
• Corporate Authors:

  Ontario Dept Hwys Jt Hwy Res Prog /Can

  ,    
• Authors:
  • Hutchinson, B G
• Publication Date: 1965-1

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Airport runways; Altitude; Analysis; Computer programs; Density; Evaluation; Geometric design; Mathematical analysis; Measuring instruments; Pavements; Records management; Riding qualities; Roughness; Serviceability; Smoothness; Surface course (Pavements); Transformations (Mathematics); Variance; Wavelength
• Uncontrolled Terms: Elevation; Profiles; Records
• Old TRIS Terms: Density functions; Pavement smoothness; Power density function; Spectral lines
• Subject Areas: Design; Finance; Highways; Pavements;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00206568
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS, ATRI
• Created Date: Aug 16 1994 12:00AM