The backbone of the modern life is highway infrastructure. The industry, military and private citizen’s are dependent on reliable and safe roads. The goal of this research is to develop a new accurate and cost effective method to monitor the health of the high-way’s
Road maintenance tasks are expensive and hard to manage. One of the major problems is getting information from road segment regarding the maintenance status of the segment. Potential maintenance problems are:
- road topping (bitumen) brakes
- water penetration into the road substrate
- substrate movements and changes due to earth quakes (even minor) or heavy traffic passing through
The above factors can change the road substrate bulk behavior, and eventually cause road damages like surface collapsing or topping cracks.
In order to warn against potential damages, we would like to monitor the characteristics of the substrate bulk, in different depths. A major characteristic of the bulk is its vibrating frequency response to pulses. I.e. measure the vibration occurred when heavy load vehicle is driving on the surface.
Changes in this frequency response along time will reflect the changes in the road substrate bulk and may indicate predicted future damage.
The purpose of this research is to develop a sensor, planted inside the road substrate, to monitor frequency response of its bulk surroundings. Then, periodically, transfer the measurements to a monitor center – collecting measurements from all utilized sensors.
This project nature is research and proof of concept.
the research was funded by the Israeli national road way company.
It was a joint research with the Technion Transportation infrastructure Laboratory
