Impact of Changes in Profile Measurement Technology on QA Testing of Pavement Smoothness: Technical Report (0-6610-1)

This project aims to establish the impact of recent changes in profiling technology on TxDOT's implementation of the Department's Item 585 and SP247-011 ride specifications. Of particular importance to this research is verification of the ride statistics and defect locations determined from profile measurements with the traditional single-point and newer wide-footprint lasers. This verification would require ground truth measurements to establish benchmarks that may be used to identify where changes are required in the existing ride specifications and determine what these changes should be. Additionally, the project needs to evaluate the bump criteria in the existing Item 585 ride specification to establish an improved methodology that engineers can use to objectively determine the need for corrections based on measured surface profiles to fix defects that diminish road-user perception of ride quality. To meet the research objectives, TxDOT divided the project into two phases. Phase I focuses on addressing the impact of new sensor technology on the Department's current ride specifications, while Phase II focuses on investigating relationships between the existing bump criteria and bump panel ratings. This report documents the research work conducted in Phase I. Based on findings from comparisons between international roughness indices determined from inertial and reference profile measurements, the report provides recommendations on using inertial profilers with different lasers for quality assurance testing of pavement smoothness.