GPR monitoring of artificial debonded pavement structures throughout its life cycle during accelerated pavement testing

Abstract

The paper gives an overview of a ground penetrating radar (GPR) experiment to survey debonding areas within pavement structure during accelerated pavement tests (APT) conducted on the university Gustave Eiffel’s fatigue carrousel. Thirteen artificial defect sections composed of three types of defects (Tack-free, Geotextile, and Sand-based) were embedded during the construction phase between the top and the base layers. The data were collected in two stages covering the entire life cycle of the pavement structure using four GPR systems: An air-coupled ultra-wideband GPR (SF-GPR), two wideband 2D ground coupled GPRs (a SIR-4000 with a 1.5 GHz antenna and a 2.6 GHz- StructureScan from GSSI manufacturer), and a wideband 3D GPR (from 3D-radar manufacturer). The first stage of the experiments took place in 2012-2013 and lasted up to 300 K loadings. During this stage, the pavement structure presented no clear degradation. The second stage of experiments was conducted in 2019 and continued until the pavement surface demonstrated a strong degradation, which was observed at 800 K loadings. At the end of the GPR experiments, several trenches were cut at various sections to get the ground truth of the pavement structure. Finally, the GPR data are processed using the conventional amplitude ratio test to study the evolution of the echoes coming from the debonded areas.