Assessment of Flexible Pavements by GPR
Résumé
Roadways are one of the most widely spread networks of transportation across the world. In France alone, roadways stretch over a million kilometers. Pavement management systems aim to maintain good road conditions. Structural conditions assessment requires information from surface conditions monitoring, and also from monitoring with non-destructive techniques such as deflection measurement and ground penetrating radar (GPR). One of the first applications of GPR in road engineering was to determine road layer thicknesses. Several GPR-basic processing methods exist for application to flexible pavements. The most common methods require a signal picking in the time domain, which can be manual or automatic. Concerning new pavement courses, in the frame of quality control of acceptance of work, gammadensimetric techniques can be performed. The interest of studying and developing a stepped-frequency radar technique comes from the limitation of impulse commercial systems for very thin course layers inspections.