Performance Evaluation of Gravel Road Sections Sealed with Surface Dressing

The rural population of India lack adequate transport infrastructure to access the nearby towns/headquarters. The Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), Government of India (GoI) decided to develop various rural roads under Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna (PMGSY). The main objective of PMGSY is to achieve all weather connectivity to all habitations. Hence, a pilot study was initiated over a 7 km gravel road stretch from “Ghanapur-Palakurthy Public Works Department (PWD) Road to Komatigudem via Ippagudem, and Rangaraigudem” in the Warangal district of Telangana State, India. There are various disadvantages associated with construction using gravel like dust generation and gravel loss over a period of time due to passage of vehicles. The best solution to minimize these problems is to seal the gravel roads. The pilot road considered in this study was constructed using locally available gravel up to the surface course and then sealed using surface dressing. The performance of the road sections were evaluated in terms of roughness, skid resistance, and texture depth. The initial set of data was collected immediately after construction and one month after construction. Later, four sets of pavement performance data was collected after seven months of construction of the surface dressing layer in November 2013, January 2014, April 2014, and June 2014. Altogether, six sets of data were collected. The data was analyzed and important observations are reported in this paper. There is a considerable change in surface texture and skid resistance values after the first one month of construction whereas no significant changes were observed in the roughness values. Further, there is no significant difference in the results of surface texture, skid resistance and roughness values when the pavement sub-sections were evaluated for four times even after seven months of construction of the sealing layer.