Ground Penetrating Radar Assessment of Flexible Road Pavement Degradation

The Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) method was applied on degraded road pavements built in cutting sections of a mountain motorway in central Italy with the goal of finding correlations between: (i) types of damage, (ii) depth of cutting sections, (iii) traffic load, and (iv) GPR scans acquired with a 1600 MHz antenna. Five types of damages were investigated on high and low cuttings road and in heavy and low traffic conditions. Road integrity was assessed via quantitative analysis of GPR signal attenuation vs. depth curves (rectified power diagram). The rectified power diagram analysis enabled to determine signal attenuation angles in both damaged and undamaged zones and their variations. Based on this analysis, the types of degradation were divided into two categories on the base of: i) crack-type degradation and ii) extensive degradation.

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