Profile Data Comparisons for Airfield Runway Pavements

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s Advisory Circular (AC) 150/5380-9 does not recommend use of inertial profilers that include highpass filtering for measuring profiles which are to be used for computing Boeing Bump Index (BBI) or simulated aircraft accelerations on airport pavements. This paper introduces the influences of the highpass filtering on BBI and aircraft accelerations. Therefore, rationales to exclude the highpass filtering which is adopted for highway pavement profiling are provided. The FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center (WJHTC) owns inertial profiling system, SurPro walking profiler, Dipstick, and highway profiling system were used for data collections. Longitudinal profile data was collected from test pavement sections including the Smart Road test facility located at Blacksburg, Virginia. The FAA roughness program, ProFAA, was used for processing the collected profiles. Since there are unknown procedures for signal processing in highway profiling systems, airport profiles from the FAA inertial profiler were filtered with multiple level of wavelengths ranging from 100 feet to 500 feet. After the highpass-filtered profiles were generated by ProFAA, comparisons were made with original profiles from the FAA profiler and from the highway profiler. The profiles from the walking profiler and dipstick are also included for the comparisons. Arbitrary bumps with different wavelength and height were created for wavelength sensitivities using the aircraft simulation function in ProFAA. The sensitivity analysis presented effective wavelengths required for airport runway pavements for given conditions in terms of accelerations at the aircraft cockpit and center of gravity.