Developing a Testing Device for Total Pavements Acceptance

The predecessor of the total pavement acceptance device (TPAD) is the rolling dynamic deflectometer (RDD). The RDD was developed by the Center for Transportation Research (CTR) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) with support from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) research program. The RDD has provided TxDOT with valuable pavement structural condition information for many years from continuous pavement deflection profiles. During the past 10 years, it was found that RDD deflection profiles can be more effectively used when combined with other nondestructive testing data such as pavement layer thicknesses and subsurface conditions from ground penetrating radar (GPR), pavement right-of-way and surface conditions from a video camera, pavement surface temperatures, and precise distance measurements. It was also found that it is sometimes difficult to integrate these different data sets when they are collected with different equipment at different times... A new, multifunction pavement testing device has been developed by a joint effort between TxDOT, CTR at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Texas A&M Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University (TTI) through TxDOT Research Project 0-6005. This device is called the total pavement acceptance device.