Traditionally pavement inspections are conducted using manually operated instruments, and hence are very labor-intensive. In this study, the authors propose the idea of using an autonomous robot to perform the pavement inspections, including for evenness and distress. Because inspection instruments are assumed to be mounted on the robot’s platform, this robot is capable of inspecting pavement c...

[1] The October 1999 Mw 7.1 Hector Mine earthquake in the Mojave Desert, California, generated characteristic surface disturbances on nearby desert pavements. These disturbances included (1) zones of wholesale gravel displacement interspersed with zones of intact pavement, (2) displaced and rotated cobbles, (3) moats around loosened, embedded boulders, (4) filling of abandoned cobble sockets, b...

Rubblization is considered one of the sustainable surface preparation techniques before placing a hot mix asphalt (HMA) overlay that involves breaking the concrete pavement into pieces. The design of the structural overlay thickness for rubblized projects is difficult as the resulting structure is neither a true rigid pavement nor a true flexible pavement. The most important aspect of the desig...

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have become significant environmental indicators in analyzing the comparative environmental impacts of conventional and newly developed alternative systems or techniques. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is considered an accepted and systematic methodology to calculate the amount of carbon released from all the processes of a system/technique, helping use...

Most bituminous adhesives or binders that are used for pavement materials are derived primarily from fossil fuels. With petroleum oil reserves becoming depleted and the drive to establish a bio-based economy, there is a push to produce binders from alternative sources, particularly from biorenewable resources. However, until now, no research has studied the applicability of utilizing bio-oils a...

Permanent structures narrower than the existing pavement are recognized highway hazards. Information has been published to demon­ strate the seriousness of the hazard, but little has been done about the effectiveness of various types of warning signs and pavement markings used to safeguard such locations. This paper reports a study at a typical narrow highway bridge location on a two-lane pavem...

The southwest Kansas region is one of the centers in the United States for the production of processed beef and related industries. Trucks utilized to support these industries cause noteworthy damages to the regional highway pavements. The objective of this research project was to determine the pavement damage cost of a typical highway section in southwest Kansas attributed to the truck traffic...

In order to overcome the high computational complexity of beamlet tree-structure algorithm, the paper proposes an improved algorithm and applies it to pavement crack detection, thereby; solving the problem of pavement crack detection which has the disadvantages of poor noise immunity and inaccurate test results. First, the pavement crack image is rectified by multiplicative factors to eliminate...

Road pavements have considerable environmental burdens associated with their initial construction, maintenance and usage, which has led the pavement stakeholder community make congregate efforts to better understand and mitigate these negative effects. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a versatile methodology to quantify the effect of decisions regarding the selection of resources and processes. H...

One of the defining characteristics of plant growth and morphology is the pivotal role of cell expansion. While the mechanical properties of the cell wall determine both the extent and direction of cell expansion, the cortical microtubule array plays a critical role in cell wall organization and, consequently, determining directional (anisotropic) cell expansion. The microtubule-severing enzyme...