A modified Close Proximity method to evaluate the time trends of road pavements acoustical performances

This paper is conceived within LEOPOLDO project, developed in Tuscany with the aim to study the acoustical characteristics of six new experimental road surfaces, and the proposed methodology has been applied to some of them. The evaluation of the local possible acoustical inhomogeneities of test pavements and a three years long monitoring of the time evolution of their acoustical performances were required by the project. Finally, a new criterion is proposed to make more reliable comparisons (differential criterion) between different road surface types and to better evaluate the temporal evolution.