The use of deflection bowl parameters to evaluate the structural condition of the North Coast Corridor of Java Island

Abstract

Abstract Monitoring the structural condition of the pavement is a very important process to be carried out periodically because it can estimate the damage that occurs as early as possible. However, this process is still constrained due to the limited non-destructive pavement response measuring instrument available and the lack of expertise in analyzing the structural condition of the road from the results of field measurements. Currently, the deflection bowl parameter method is one of the methods developed in research in South Africa to provide a more user-friendly method in determining the indication of the bearing capacity of the pavement layers. The use of this method in Indonesia is still limited, so this study aimed to evaluate the suitability of its use on roads in Indonesia. For this purpose, deflection data was collected from several arterial roads on the North Coast of Java Island. The study resulted that the deflection bowl parameter method generally can be applied to roads in Indonesia. However, the method has to be used with caution because of the complexity of the pavement structure layers on the North Coast Road of Java Island, especially for the layers that have undergone major repairs. In addition, the benchmarking process for the deflection bowl parameter criteria also only applied to roads with medium traffic load repetitions (up to 50 million ESAL), so upgrading the limit of the traffic load of the parameters was required so that the parameters could be used for roads with very high traffic load repetition as the one at the North Coast corridor.