Pavement thickness evaluation using ground penetrating radar

Accurate knowledge of pavement thickness is important information to have both at a network and project level. This information aids in pavement management and design. Much of the time this information is missing, out of date, or unknown for highway sections. Current technologies for determining pavement thickness are core drilling, falling weight deflectometer (FWD), and ground penetrating radar (GPR). Core drilling provides very accurate pin point pavement thickness information; however, it is also time consuming, labor intensive, intrusive to traffic, destructive, and limited in coverage. FWD provides nondestructive estimates of both a surface thickness and total pavement structure thickness, including pavement, base and sub-base. On the other hand, FWD is intrusive to traffic and affected by the limitations and assumptions the method used to estimate thickness. GPR provides pavement surface course thickness estimates with excellent data coverage at highway speed. Yet, disadvantages include the pavement thickness estimation being affected by the electrical properties of the pavement, limitations of the system utilized, and heavy post processing of the data. Nevertheless, GPR has been successfully utilized by a number of departments of transportation (DOTs) for pavement thickness evaluation. This research presents the GPR thickness evaluation methods, develops GPRPAVZ the software used to implement the methodologies, and addresses the quality of GPR pavement thickness evaluation.