Pavement Testing Using Nondestructive MASW Approach: Fid-Bau Portal

Pavement Testing Using Nondestructive MASW Approach

Gohil, Ramdev R. / Kumar, Jyant / Parthasarathy, C. R.

In this study, the MASW testing was carried out on asphalt pavement using several accelerometers and geophones to characterize the stiffness profile of the pavement. Park’s phase-shift method was applied to the experimental data to obtain the dispersion image in the frequency-phase velocity domain. Typical pavement structures have high stiffness layers, such as the asphaltic or concrete layer above the underlying less stiff subgrade. The dispersion image for such a case shows an increasing trend of phase velocity with increased frequency, which contrasts with the normally dispersive soil profiles. This obtained dispersion curve can be easily mistaken as a single continuous curve for inversion analysis, leading to errors in the obtained profile of the pavement, which includes shear wave velocity (V_S) and thickness of each layer (h). The predominant modes obtained from the fast delta matrix method for assumed pavement layers are matched with the effective dispersion curves obtained from experiments to obtain the correct results for properties of each layer. The automatic inversion using Monte Carlo-based global search algorithm gives a pavement profile that matches the extracted core sample results.