Design And Optimization Of Point-laser Based Rut Measurement Methods And Development Of The Simulation Platform

Asphalt pavement degradation usually arises from five aspects:fatigue cracking, rutting, thermal cracking, friction, and moisture susceptibility. Rutting is one of the most important merits of asphalt pavement characteristics description. It is often defined as the pavement depressing caused by vehicle tires. Developing of the economics and the following heavy traffic make pavements suffer a lot from external pressure, especially from truck tires which are of great pressure. These make asphalt pavements vulnerable to ruts and greatly influence the normal operation of pavements. Therefore, ruts are one of the most concerned problems in the field of pavement design and maintenance. Rut depth is the most commonly used merit to describe a rut. The requirement of rut depth measurement comes from two aspects:one is that the traffic management department and pavement service providers need to know the rut depth to determine if the pavements need repairs. The other is required by the APT (Accelerated Pavement Testing) projects, which are conducted to research the relations between rut depth and the pavement structure, materials, climate, traffic volume, tire pressure as well as load level. There are lots of rut depth measurement techniques, however, in this study we focus on the point-laser based measurement methods due to its high accuracy, low cost and wide use. For the case of engineering application, people tend to adapt too few laser sensors to cut the cost resulting in very raw results. Oppositely, in the application of research, people use very expensive equipment, which to some extent limits the research itself, to obtain data of high accuracy. Based on this fact, in this work we try to optimize the popular measure methods of engineering application while keeping the cost low, and propose a new low-cost method for research application while keeping the accuracy high. We also developed a simulation platform to optimize and verify our methods. The main contents and achievements are as follows:1. Reviewing rut depth measurement methods in engineering application and proposing a new method for research application.2. Developing a simulation platform used for optimizing and verifying different rut depth measurement methods.3. Simulating the sampling process of the main methods for engineering application as well as the new proposed method for research application. 4. Optimizing the methods for engineering application by comparing various scenarios and sensor configurations.5. Verifying the new proposed method for research application.