Appropriate and reliable use of Pavement Instrumentation on In-Service Roads

In order to check the reliability of pavement design models, instrumentations such as strain gauges and pressure cells are embedded in pavement structures to measure pavement responses under loading. Many problems can arise during pavement instrumentation that determine the success or failure of the instrumented experiment. The paper documents the work conducted on six in-service pavement test sections within the Leopoldo research project, in Italy, and discusses the criteria used for the instrumentation choose, for the development of the instrumentation arrays depending on the purpose of the study and on the pavement response as well as the principal problems faced during the setup of the experiment. A particular procedure has been set up for measurement of wheel wander whilst gauge alignments have been reported on pavement surface by tomography techniques. Measured pavement responses have been analyzed and compared with theoretical models to check their reliability.