Ground Penetrating Radar Assessment of Flexible Road Pavement Degradation

GPR investigations were used to study degraded road pavements built in cutting sections. Road integrity was assessed via quantitative analysis of power curves. 1600 MHz and 600 MHz radar sections were collected in 40 damaged and undamaged road pavement sites. The collected data were processed as follows: (i) linearisation with regression analysis of power curves; (ii) assessment of absorption angle a alpha which is directly proportional to absorption coefficient a (this was obtained by setting the e.m. propagation velocity to 10 cm/ns); (iii) comparison of absorption coefficients in both damaged and undamaged zones with respect to road pavement degradation. If the absorption coefficients of damaged and undamaged road sections have nearly the same value, then the likely cause of degradation is the fatigue or the thermal shrinkage; if they are not, then road degradation is due to the different compactness of the soil caused by vehicular traffic load. In a considerable number of sites, the statistical comparison of damaged and undamaged zones through the absorption coefficient analysis shows that surface observations of road pavements are quite consistent with power curve analyses.