8th International Conference on Managing Pavement Assets NEW PAVEMENT DETERIORATION MODELS FOR SEALED

Long term pavement performance (LTPP) monitoring and accelerated load testing of arterial road deterioration has been ongoing in Australia since 1994 to develop functional and structural road deterioration (RD) mechanistic-empirical deterministic models for sealed unbound granular pavements. In 2001 a study of sealed local road deterioration was commenced that involved monitoring of over 500 sites located across all Australian states and territories for a period of five years. The geographical spread of these sites allowed a wide sampling of climatic and traffic conditions. This study was completed in 2010 and was aimed at developing new local road functional and structural RD models for sealed low volume roads based on the observational data collected by the study. The number of observations at each site was restricted to three over the five year monitoring period due to research funding restrictions; however, when all the observations were pooled together some 1500 observations, covering a range of measured pavement conditions (roughness, rutting and surface deflection), were initially available for model development. RD model development was initially based on the RD model forms used for the longer based observational and experimental study of sealed unbound granular arterial road deterioration. On the basis of a reasonably broad level of sampling, the development of robust functional and structural RD models was expected for the sealed local roads using an RD model form that had sufficient explanatory independent variables. This paper documents the development and outcomes of this work for local sealed roads. KEY WORDS: Long term pavement performance, deterioration models