Adaptive quality control and acceptance of pavement material density for intelligent road construction

• A system approach for road construction adaptive quality control/acceptance is developed.
• It integrates material property, roller response, information and human decision.
• Pass-by-pass nuclear gauge density has fairly good linear correlation with ICMV.
• The approach improves construction quality through adaptive control of compaction.
• It calculates stiffness uniformity and density reliability for quality acceptance.

During conventional road construction, quality control and acceptance (QC/QA) are based on limited spot tests of material density at random locations which may not be representative of the compacted area and may consist of potential bias. This research presented an innovative material-machine-information and human-decision integrated system for adaptive QC/QA using the intelligent compaction (IC) technology to overcome the above limitation of conventional testing. In this integrated system, compaction properties such as material stiffness are monitored in real time with 100% coverage of compacted areas by instrumented IC rollers. By monitoring compaction process and roller–ground interactions, this system can be used to determine compaction target values, which are in-turn fed back to the IC system to optimize compaction efforts and improve construction quality. This approach can also be used to determine compaction uniformity for the as-built in order to assess pavement performance. Recommended further development of the intelligent road construction technology is presented to fully leverage the IC technologies in the future.

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