Impact of Diamond Grinding on Rigid Pavement Performance

摘要

The surface roughness in terms of International Roughness Index (IRI) captures variation in vertical surface elevations along the pavement length. Diamond grinding is a rigid pavement preservation treatment which is typically utilized to increase pavement smoothness by eliminating the surface undulations. The focus of this study is to evaluate the impact of diamond grinding on rigid pavement performance by using the mechanistic-empirical procedure. The effectiveness of a diamond grinding was assessed by evaluating the IRI before and after the treatment. Generally, smoother pavements will have lower IRI, which will result in less vehicle body and axle bounce. Consequently, the pavement will be subjected to reduced dynamic loads which may cause less pavement damage or vice versa. The longitudinal profile and axle load data from the Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) in the SPS-6 experiment were utilized to evaluate the impact of diamond grinding on pavement performance. These experiments were designed to evaluate the effectiveness of rigid pavement rehabilitation treatments. The data for pavement sections from two climatic zones were evaluated before and after diamond grinding. The axle distributions for each pavement section were utilized to generate truck gross-vehicle weight (GVW) distributions. Subsequently, the truck GVW distributions were used to generate truck response on different pavement surface profiles by using TruckSim software. The impact of surface roughness on dynamic loads was evaluated by comparing axle load spectra before and after diamond grinding. The variations in the axle load spectra are used to explain the differences in the predicted pavement performance in terms of cracking, faulting and IRI.