Successful Application of Ground-Penetrating Radar for Quality Assurance-Quality Control of New Pavements

Abstract

The successful application of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) as a quality assurance–quality control tool to measure the layer thicknesses of newly built pavement systems is described. A study was conducted on a newly built test section of Route 288 located near Richmond, Virginia. The test section is a three-lane, 370-m-long flexible pavement system composed of a granular base layer and three different hot-mix asphalt (HMA) lifts. GPR surveys were conducted on each lift of the HMA layers after they were constructed. To estimate the layer thicknesses, GPR data were analyzed by using simplified equations in the time domain. The accuracies of the GPR system results were checked by comparing the thicknesses predicted with the GPR to the thicknesses measured directly from a large number of cores taken from the different HMA lifts. This comparison revealed a mean thickness error of 2.9% for HMA layers ranging in thickness from 100 mm (4 in.) to 250 mm (10 in.). This error is similar to the one obtained from the direct measurement of core thickness.